President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday reiterated his commitment to “vigorously pursue” the death penalty, targeting President Joe Biden. decision to commute the sentences of almost all federal death row inmates.
Trump also added to the backlash from some against Biden’s unprecedented move, which has drawn both criticism and praise.
“It doesn’t make any sense.” Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social. “Relatives and friends are even more devastated. They can’t believe this is happening!
“As soon as I take office, I will call on the Department of Justice to vigorously enforce the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers and monsters,” he added. he continued. “We will once again be a nation of law and order!”
Biden announced Monday that he would commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 federal inmates sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, saying he was “guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender.”
The action had been speculated for weeks by a broad coalition of criminal justice groups, former prosecutors and business leaders. writes letters to the White House to ask him to commute the sentences before Trump takes office. Pope Francis also this month appeals to BidenCatholic, to commute sentences; Biden should meet the pontiff next month, in the final days of his presidency.
In a declaration On Monday, the president noted that the commutations are consistent with the moratorium on executions his administration imposed after taking office, and that “I cannot in good conscience stand back and let a new administration resume the executions that I interrupted.”
But Biden also insisted on refusing to commute the sentences of three federal death row inmates involved in massacres: Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 people in the Synagogue of the Tree of Life filming in Pittsburgh in 2018; Dylann Roof, who shot nine people during a Historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who carried out a bomb attack against Boston Marathon in 2013.
Although he spared the lives of the other 37 detainees, Biden added: “Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, I grieve for the victims of their despicable actions, and I ache for all the families who have suffered loss.” unimaginable and irreparable. »
Trump campaigned on expanding the federal death penalty after his first term, during which his Justice Department put 13 federal inmates to death — an unprecedented record. since the presidency of Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s.
Trump has since said he would like to expand the death penalty to include child rapists, migrants killing American citizens and law enforcement officers, as well as those convicted of drug and human trafficking. It’s unclear exactly how the president-elect would proceed, and legal experts argue it would require congressional support and would face immense constitutional challenges.
Still, death penalty supporters said they took Trump’s statements seriously.
Biden, meanwhile, faces criticism over his death row commutation, not only from his political opponents, but also from law enforcement and some victims’ families.
“We thought the timing was despicable,” said Tim Timmerman, whose 19-year-old daughter Rachel was killed in 1997. told NBC affiliate WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
His daughter’s convicted killer, Marvin Gabrion, is also accused of killing Rachel Timmerman’s granddaughter, whose body was never found, and is the prime suspect in three other deaths. Gabrion is now 71 years old.
“Where is the justice in just giving him a prison bed to die comfortably?” Timmerman said, adding: “It wasn’t me who sentenced Gabrion to the death penalty. It was the jury, and I always think it’s important to emphasize this: It was the jurors who convicted Gabrion to the death penalty.”
The daughter of Donna Major, one of two South Carolina bank employees killed by federal death row inmate Brandon Council in 2017, called Council’s sentence commutation unfair and an “abuse of power.”
“My mother’s murder is being used as a coin in a political game by a president who is not even fit for office,” Heather Turner posted Tuesday on Facebook. “I stand by my position that Joe Biden has blood on his hands.”
While Biden is being praised by anti-death penalty groups who have long argued that the death penalty process is tainted, in part because of racial disparities among those sentenced to death and executed, some also believe that he did not go far enough in not commuting all federal death row inmates as well as the four inmates on US military death row.
The Rev. Sharon Risher, chair of the board of directors of Death Penalty Action whose her mother, Ethel Lance, and her cousins, Tywanza Sanders and Susie Jackson, were among those killed in the 2015 Charleston shooting, said in a statement that “politics got in the way of mercy.”
“You cannot rank the victims, Mr. President. I implore you to finish the job, not only with the three men who are still on federal death row, but also with those who are on federal death row. military death,” Risher said. “There’s still time.”