Biden commutes sentences of all but three convicts on federal death row

Two days before Christmas, President Joe Biden said he was commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 people who faced federal death sentences for such crimes as killing police officers and military service members, killing people in bank robberies or killing guards or prisoners in federal prisons.

"Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss," Biden said in a Dec. 23, 2024, statement. But he added, "I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level."

His decision broadly adheres to a continuing moratorium on federal death sentences that his administration announced in 2021. 

In 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered a moratorium on federal executions to review policies from President-elect Donald Trump's first term. During that term, the U.S. Justice Department expedited federal executions, expanded execution methods and authorized the use of state execution chambers. 

The Trump administration carried out 13 federal executions. Biden's moratorium meant there were no federal executions on his watch. 

Biden said the 37 commutations he announced, "are consistent with the moratorium," in that they excluded cases for "terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder."

The three people who did not receive commutations were Dylann Roof, a white man who in 2015 murdered nine congregants at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who murdered three and injured hundreds at the 2013 Boston Marathon; and Robert Bowers, who murdered 11 congregants at Pittsburgh's Tree of life Synagogue in 2018.

The Justice Department under Garland has argued for the death penalty for Payton Gendron, a white supremacist who murdered 10 Black people at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in 2022. Gendron pleaded guilty to state charges but the federal case has not been adjudicated yet.

Two of the 37 federal inmates, Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis, have sought injunctions to block Biden's commutation. Agofsky and Davis are seeking to overturn their convictions based on claims of innocence; they argue that no longer being on death row would pose additional obstacles to those appeals by reducing the judicial scrutiny their cases receive; death penalty cases receive higher priority for such appeals.

Commuting 37 sentences does not fulfill Biden's goal of passing federal legislation to eliminate the death penalty on a continuing basis, and his commutations do not amount to across-the-board clemency for federal death row inmates. But they do eliminate the possibility of executions for most of the existing federal death row population, in a way Trump can't undo in his second term. We rate this Compromise.