President Biden should commute the death sentences of all federal prisoners by Chris Byrd

As many have observed, President Joe Biden’s consequential domestic legislative achievements will positively impact the quality of Americans’ lives for decades. But his failure to fulfill his 2020 campaign promise to end the death penalty is notably absent from the president’s substantial, commendable record.

Biden may not be able to deliver completely on that vow, but commuting the death sentences of the 40 federal death row prisoners would dramatically move the nation toward the his laudable goal.

Since capital punishment’s reinstatement in 1976, very few federal death row prisoners have received presidential commutations: David Ronald Chandler from President Clinton in January 2001, and Abelardo Arboleda Ortiz and Dwight Loving from President Obama in January 2017.

His predecessors may not have acted audaciously on death row commutations, but governors’ actions in eight states should encourage Biden to act more boldly. 

Because his state had released more people from death row—13—than it had executed—12—Illinois’ Democratic Governor George Ryan, in mass clemency’s most dramatic illustration, commuted the sentences of all 167 people on the state’s death row and pardoned four men whom he believed to be innocent in 2003. (Governor Ryan was later convicted of public corruption charges from his time as governor and served more than five years in federal prison.)

In another example of wholesale commutations, New Mexico’s Democratic governor Tony Anaya commuted five death row prisoners’ sentences in 1986, when a Gallup poll showed that 70 percent of Americans supported capital punishment.

Public attitudes toward state killing have shifted considerably since Anaya’s courageous decision. Support for capital punishment peaked at 80 percent in the 1990s, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). But for the first time in the history of a Gallup poll taken since 2000, a 2023 national survey revealed that a majority of Americans believed the death penalty was applied unfairly.

Concerns about executing innocent people, botched executions, and the growing awareness that not all murder victims endorse capital punishment have has turned more Americans away from the ultimate sanction.

In July, when California inmate Larry Roberts was exonerated for the 1983 murder of a fellow prisoner and a prison guard, our nation reached a dubious milestone: the 200th person exonerated from death row. For every 8.2 individuals executed in the US, one person has been judged innocent. When the punishment is irrevocable, many ask: Can we afford these many mistakes?

More disturbingly, the growing number of botched executions has alienated many from capital punishment. More than one-third of executions conducted in the US in 2022 were botched. 

Alabama, having botched Kenneth Smith’s lethal injection in 2022, employed the unproven nitrogen-gas method to kill him in January 2024. Macabre attempts to murder people multiple times and delusional efforts to find a “humane” form of execution have renewed the objection that state killing violates the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Established by the late Bill Pelke in 1993, the Journey of Hope—murder-victim families opposed to capital punishment—has changed numerous hearts on this issue by exposing the myth that all family members want the death penalty.

On January 14, 1985, 15-year-old Paula Cooper stabbed Pelke’s beloved grandmother Ruth 33 times with a butcher knife. Pelke recalled how Ruth, a devout Christian, would give religious lessons to children. This compelled the white steelworker to forgive the young Black woman and work for her release from prison in 2013, 27 years after her initial death sentence on July 11, 1986. (Cooper tragically died on May 26, 2015, apparently by suicide.)

Despite this loss, Pelke still believed—as he often, famously said—“The answer is love and compassion for all of humanity.”

Our empathetic president should naturally embrace Pelke’s mindset to spare the lives of the 40 federal death row souls, confident the public is more receptive to clemency. Liberated because he is no longer on the ballot, Biden can again demonstrate through these commutations that “I’m not Trump,” as he declared during the 2020 campaign.

In the final eight months of Trump’s term as president, “the most pro-life president in our history” as many mystifyingly refer to him, went on a killing spree overseen by Catholic Attorney General William Barr that took the lives of 13 federal death row prisoners. A second Trump administration, according to the Project 2025 blueprint, would attempt to execute prisoners more quickly and expand the federal death penalty to include crimes the Supreme Court has ruled ineligible for death, such as child sexual abuse.

If he commutes these death sentences, President Biden will choose mercy, sending the nation “the Lord’s most powerful message,” as Pope Francis says. This will add commendably to Biden’s domestic legacy, distinguished by a fundamentally Catholic desire to promote decency and dignity.

Making these commutations will more significantly forestall the dreaded trajectory of barbarism Trump advocates, and will put the nation on a path to wholeness that will come when we finally end state killing. ♦

Chris Byrd is the author of Sisters: The Extraordinary Lives of Serena and Anna Marie Branson.