Two days before Christmas, President Joe Biden offered mercy to 37 of the 40 murderers placed on federal death row — some of whom abducted and sexually assaulted their victims before killing them.
Biden commuted the sentences of these individuals Monday morning, meaning they will escape the death penalty and serve the remainder of their lives in prison without the possibility of parole. The outgoing president’s move came a month before he will transfer power to president-elect Donald Trump, who has said he would lift the Biden administration’s moratorium on the death penalty in his second term.
Trump oversaw 13 federal executions the last time he was in office. By contrast, no federal inmates were executed during Biden’s presidency or vice presidency.
All 37 men were convicted of murder for their despicable acts.
Below are some of the prisoners who will escape capital punishment thanks to Biden:
Thomas Steven Sanders kidnapped and shot 12-year-old Lexis Roberts four times, sliced her throat, and dumped her body in the Louisiana woods in 2010. A hunter later found her body. Days earlier, Sanders killed the girl’s mother, Suellen Roberts, while the three went on a road trip to the Grand Canyon. He was dating the 31-year-old mother at the time.
In 2014, a federal jury imposed the death penalty on Sanders. According to the International Business Times, he was scheduled to die by lethal injection, nitrogen hypoxia, or electrocution for the two murders.
Anthony George Battle bludgeoned Atlanta prison guard D’Antonio Washington, 31, to death with a hammer in 1994 while already serving a lifetime sentence for raping and murdering his wife in 1987 at Camp Lejeune, N.C. The married couple both served as Marines.
The prison guard’s father felt defeated when he heard Battle received a new sentence. “I don’t think it’s justice, but there is nothing I can do about it,” Frederick Neil Washington told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Monday.
Meanwhile, in 1994, Richard Allen Jackson kidnapped, raped, and murdered a 22-year-old female jogger in Pisgah National Forest near Asheville, N.C. Prior to Karen Styles’s death, the man duct-taped her to a tree and raped her. After, he repeatedly shocked her with a taser. Styles screamed for help after the duct tape on her mouth was loosened, prompting Jackson to shoot her point-blank in the head. Still duct-taped to the tree, her body was found nearly a month later.
Jackson tried appealing his death sentence years later, arguing the federal government failed to prove he committed a “crime of violence.” That punishment was upheld by a federal appeals court in 2022.
Len Davis, a former New Orleans police officer, enlisted a drug dealer to murder a 32-year-old woman who filed a police brutality complaint against him in 1994. The complaint alleged he beat up a 17-year-old boy after mistaking him for a suspect in the shooting of a fellow police officer.
Less than a day after she filed the complaint, Kim Groves, a mother of three young children, was shot dead. Groves was killed one day before her daughter’s 13th birthday.
Lastly, Jorge Avila-Torrez sexually assaulted and stabbed two girls — Laura Hobbs, 8, and Krystal Tobias, 9 — who were riding their bicycles in their neighborhood in a suburb north of Chicago on Mother’s Day in 2005. The girls suffered multiple stab wounds to their necks and faces. He spent a few years in jail, but that wasn’t the last heinous crime he committed.
After joining the Marines, Avila-Torrez fatally strangled naval officer Amanda Snell, 20, in her barracks in Arlington, Va., in 2009. He wasn’t apprehended until after he stalked and abducted three young women in Arlington in 2010. He raped, sodomized, and strangled one of the women, leaving her for dead on the side of the road. Ultimately, she survived after someone found her and called an ambulance.
Beyond the 37 murderers that received partial clemency, the three men who remain on federal death row are Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who killed three people alongside his older brother in 2013; Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., in 2015; and Robert Bowers, who carried out the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting that killed 11 Jewish congregants in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 2018.
Biden’s move to reprieve the death sentences, which the White House said was part of his effort to ensure a “fair and effective justice system” for all, does not apply to criminals who committed terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.
Biden said nothing regarding why the death penalties in these cases were unfair or unjust — only that he wanted to stop the incoming administration from executing the 37 federal prisoners.
“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 statement.
“But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”