Joe Biden commutes sentences of nearly all federal death row inmates — except three mass killers
SalonPresident Joe Biden heeded the calls of anti-death penalty campaigners and spared all but three federal prisoners from the threat of execution on Monday, commuting a total of 37 sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In a statement, Biden, who has overseen a moratorium on federal executions even as federal prosecutors continue to seek the death penalty, cast the move as an act of mercy. "uided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level," Biden said. Those excluded from Biden's commutations are all mass murderers: Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who killed nine Black worshipers at a South Carolina church in 2015; Robert Bowers, who killed 11 congregants at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue in 2018; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who planted bombs at the Boston Marathon in 2013, killing three people.