Will President Joe Biden commute all federal death sentences or will he break another campaign promise before he leaves office in January? Last week, hundreds of organizations and community leaders wrote to President Biden calling for an end to the death penalty. They cited systemic bias, racism and evidence that the death penalty does not have a deterrent effect on crime. Even Pope Francis joined these calls and called on the United States to put an end to the practice. A practicing Catholic, Biden has claimed to oppose the death penalty and promised to abolish it during his 2020 presidential campaign. In July 2021, the Justice Department issued a moratorium on executions but did not go further.
The 68-page package of letters was sent on behalf of a broad coalition of advocates representing diverse communities across the United States. They included prison reform activists, retired federal judges, current and former prosecutors, family members of murder victims, Black and Indigenous faith leaders, and human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. A letter from family members of murder victims states:
For too many of us, the death penalty has only added a lengthy process to an already torturous experience, leaving us with more pain, despair and isolation. The complex, constitutionally mandated legal process results in decades of uncertainty and waiting, allowing trauma to surface and healing to be delayed.
For all of us, this system completely ignores our real needs and diverts money and attention from the critical services our families desperately need in the wake of violence.
The death penalty does not prevent violence. It doesn't solve a crime. It divides families when we need each other most.
The coalition argues that commuting the sentences of those still on death row would allow the government to redirect its resources toward measures to improve public safety, which the death penalty does not.
Now is the ideal time to take a firm stand against the death penalty. Not only did President Biden promise on the campaign trail that he would commute all federal sentences for those still on death row, but there is also an imminent danger that the system will go into overdrive with the arrival of President-elect Donald Trump .
Additionally, support for the death penalty is declining in the United States. According to a November 2024 Gallup poll, only 53 percent of people support the death penalty, a sharp decline from the 80 percent in 1994. Additionally, according to a November 2023 Gallup poll, more Americans now believe that the death penalty should be imposed are applied unfairly than those who do not (50 percent versus 47 percent).
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Not only does the new president have no plans to abolish the death penalty, but Donald Trump has also stated his intention to expand the death penalty to people convicted of drug trafficking, child rape, human traffickers and immigrants who kill U.S. citizens. More people were executed on federal death row during Trump's first term than under the ten previous presidents combined. When he announced his 2024 candidacy, the president-elect said: “We will require anyone who sells drugs and is caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty for their heinous actions.”
2024 was a terrible year of reckoning about the risks and dangers of the death penalty in a flawed justice system. In September, Missouri executed Marcellus Williams after the Supreme Court refused to intervene. Prosecutors raised significant objections, claiming systemic flaws in the case, including racism, the victim's family's support for the stay of execution and new DNA evidence proving Williams' innocence.
In October, the execution of Texan Robert Roberson for alleged “shaken baby syndrome” was halted at the last minute in response to public outcry that a miscarriage of justice was taking place. The medical evidence for the syndrome is unclear and many dismiss it as “junk science,” meaning Roberson is in prison for a crime that may never have been committed. Melissa Lucio also spent 16 years on death row and was two days away from being executed in Texas for the alleged murder of her daughter, but then a judge intervened on the grounds that Lucio never committed the crime. “The applicant is actually innocent; she did not kill her daughter,” District Judge Arturo Nelson wrote in October. Her case will now be reviewed by the Texas Court of Appeals.
The fate of Roberson and Lucio is still controversial, but it highlights how inhumane the United States' death penalty system is. Periodically, the public is subjected to grotesque spectacles in which we watch as deadly miscarriages of justice become headline news only when it is too late. Abolishing the death penalty must be a national conversation, not a sporadic one.
The time for political leadership is long overdue. If President Biden — a supporter of the 1994 crime bill that expanded mass incarceration of black and brown workers — can find it within himself to pardon his son, then he should do the right thing and muster the strength to stick to his principles and campaign promises. If Biden wants to leave the Oval Office with dignity and some semblance of integrity, then he should practice what he preached on the campaign trail by commuting the death sentence for all the people currently inhumanely on America's increasingly unpopular death row languish.
Raquel Rosario Sánchez is a writer, researcher and activist from the Dominican Republic.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own.
