President Joe Biden on Monday commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row, reclassifying their sentences to prevent President-elect Donald Trump from allowing their executions when he returns to office in January.
The 37 men were all convicted of murder. Their sentences will be reclassified from execution to life in prison without the possibility of parole, according to the White House.
The men whose sentences are being reclassified include Shannon Agofsky, who murdered a bank president, dumped his body in a lake, and then killed another man in prison; Brandon Basham and Chadrick Fulks, who escaped from prison and killed two women while on a 17-day crime spree; Ricky Allen Fackrell, a white supremacist who killed a prison inmate; and Daryl Lawrence, who killed a police officer during a bank robbery.
“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 statement. “But guided by my conscience and my experience, . . . I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.”
Biden only left three men on federal death row: Robert Bowers, the gunman who shot and killed eleven worshipers at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue in 2018; Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who killed nine people at a black church during a Bible study in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber.
Biden, a Catholic, campaigned on ending the federal death penalty and directed the Department of Justice to issue a moratorium on federal executions. However, legislation he proposed to end the federal death penalty didn’t advance in Congress. Critics of the mass commutation say that Biden is undermining Congress.
Trump had promised to lift the moratorium on federal executions when he returns to office next month. Thirteen federal prisoners were put to death during his first term.
The move to commute the death sentences comes after Biden set a single-day clemency record earlier this month by commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 people and pardoning 39 more.
Before that, Biden announced a sweeping pardon for his son, Hunter, ahead of the younger Biden’s sentencing for federal gun and tax offenses. That move received widespread blowback, even from many Democrats who argued that it set a bad precedent and appeared to put the president’s personal interests above the country’s.