President Joe Biden, as is not uncommon for chief executives about to leave office, has spent his last days dispensing governmental acts of mercy before he loses the power to do so.
His decision to commute the sentences of 37 of 40 federal death row inmates this week has brought renewed attention to the debate about capital punishment and the ambivalence this nation has toward the ultimate penalty.
What Biden did — changing all of those inmates’ death sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole — is what opponents of the death penalty have long advocated. It forever protects society from these dangerous criminals, while avoiding the possibility of a wrongly convicted person being executed. It also respects life, upholding the principle that no one has the right to terminate human life prior to its natural end, and applies that principle where it’s the most difficult to do so.
Besides concerns about the potential execution of the wrongly convicted, there are also serious reservations about whether the death penalty is fairly applied. Minorities and the poor are more likely to receive a death sentence than are whites and those with the means to hire their own legal counsel.
Biden’s action does not go as far as he had previously indicated he would like to go. He left three federal prisoners on death row whose mass killings — at a synagogue in Pennsylvania in 2018, at a Black church in South Carolina in 2015, and at the Boston Marathon in 2013 — were so horrendous that it would have been difficult to commute their sentences without political backlash for the Democratic president’s party.
This retreat on the death penalty at the federal level is likely to be short-lived. President-elect Donald Trump, a strong supporter of capital punishment, said he was horrified by Biden’s decision and will direct his administration to vigorously pursue the death penalty on future prosecutions where it’s a possible punishment. He would also like Congress to expand the death penalty to include other crimes.
On this issue, however, the exiting president is closer to where the country’s attitudes are moving than is the president-elect.
The states, which deal with the death penalty much more frequently than the federal government, have been steadily gravitating away from it. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, more than half of the states either have abolished the death penalty or have governors who have suspended its application. Mississippi, as with most conservative states, defends capital punishment and mostly complains about how long it takes to carry out a death sentence.
Critics of Biden’s decision will claim he is being soft on crime. That’s an unfair characterization. To condemn murderers to life in prison without the possibility of ever getting out is hardly lenient.
Letting that person, though, eventually die in prison from natural causes is kind on taxpayers and on the conscience. It avoids the high cost of all the appeals that come with a death sentence. It also spares our nation from the contradiction of showing its abhorrence of murder by killing those who commit it.
