Activists to Biden: Commute All Death Sentences

The facts speak for themselves: Black people make up just 13% of the U.S. population, yet they make up nearly 40% of all death row inmates in federal prison. During his first term as president, Donald Trump put more people to death than the 10 presidents before him.

On Monday, a coalition of civil rights advocates, interfaith leaders and loved ones of homicide victims publicly called on President Joe Biden to commute all federal death sentences before he transfers power to Trump next month.

“The death penalty has for generations been a veiled extension of our national legacy of racial terror and lynchings,” Jamila Hodge, CEO of Equal Justice USA, the organization behind the push for clemency, said in a statement. Biden, she said, has an opportunity to block an execution “spree” under Trump while simultaneously “moving us closer to reckoning with a system that unfairly targets Black people.”

Joia Thornton, founder and national director of the Faith Leaders of Color Coalition, which is helping spearhead the outreach to Biden, said Biden can burnish his legacy while demonstrating his well-known reputation for compassion.

“Commuting the federal death row [sentences] would be an incredible milestone for those who believe life has value, mercy is encompassing, and grace covers a multitude of sin,” Thornton said.

The coalition lobbying the president is broad, to say the least. It includes Black pastors, Catholic church communities, former corrections officials, civil rights advocates, current and former prosecutors, families who have lost loved ones to homicide, pro-life conservatives, mental health advocates, business leaders, and more, according to a press release.

Its breadth, however, reflects a growing shift away from the death penalty: Polls show about half the country support it, but that support is far lower than it’s been since the Supreme Court lifted a nationwide ban  in 1976.

While supporters believe the punishment is justified for horrific crimes the condemned inmate may have committed, opponents point out its flaws — including substantial, undeniable racial bias.

Since 1973, more than 189 people awaiting execution in federal and state prisons have been exonerated — in some cases, not long before their scheduled execution date. Of those exonerees, 100 are Black.  At the same time, 38% of the 40 federal death row inmates are Black.

The advocates pushing Biden to grant clemency believe he must act before Trump’s inauguration Jan. 20.

During his first term, Trump embraced the death penalty: data shows his administration carried out 13 executions during his four years in office, including one that took place just 5 days before Biden’s inauguration. It was the highest number of federal executions since World War II.

That data point tracks, though: Before he entered politics, Trump believed in capital punishment, even if the crime didn’t involve a homicide.

In 1989, when five young Black men were accused of brutalizing a white woman who was jogging in Manhattan’s Central Park, Trump took out full-page newspaper ads demanding the suspects’ execution. The defendants, known as the Central Park Five, were convicted and spent decades in prison before they were exonerated.

The Central Park Five have sued Trump for defamation after Trump, debating Vice President Kamala Harris in September, insisted they were guilty of the crime.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which is part of the coalition urging this action, has pointed out that Project 2025 — the archconservative blueprint for remaking the federal government — calls for the death penalty to be used in even non-homicide cases. Trump has disavowed Project 2025, even though several former staffers from his first administration helped write the document, and some of them could get job in the incoming administration.

Besides righting past wrongs, Thornton, the Faith Leaders of Color Coalition director, argues that Biden’s commutation of federal death row inmates’ sentences “would bring immediate benefits” for the nation while adding an important accomplishment to Biden’s presidential legacy.

“It would acknowledge and help redress the racial bias built into the federal death penalty system,” Thornton said. It would redirect vast government resources from carrying out executions to “policies that actually improve public safety.”

That, she says, would “allow the families of victims and incarcerated persons to focus on healing instead of living in legal limbo.”

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