Biden has commuted most but not all federal death penalty sentences

[conuly]

Metafilter is the first place I saw that, so that's the link I'm going with.

I'd be happier with a few more pardons and commutations, but I will say, this is more than I ever expected to see.

Gonna forward date this to the holiday. Merry Christmas.

Comments

[lilysea]

I was curious about the three people who weren't pardoned (Joe Biden has commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 inmates on federal death row), and the people who were not pardoned were:

Dylann Roof, who carried out the 2015 racist slayings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina;

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber;

Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh's Tree of life Synagogue in 2018, the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in US history

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-23/joe-biden-commutes-sentences-of-most-federal-death-row-inmates/104759312

[conuly]

A commutation is not a pardon.

A commutation is "We're changing your punishment to something easier - say, instead of the death penalty you have life in prison without parole".

A pardon is "We're retroactively deciding that the crime doesn't count and, legally, you're free and clear... but without us overturning the original conviction, which is something else".

[oracne]

A merry Christmas indeed!

[neotoma]

3 people convicted of various types of terrorism. I'm not actually surprised that terrorism was the exclusion criterion, given that there was an exclusion criterion at all.

[hudebnik]

Yes, if we're going to have a death penalty at all, I could see it applying to people who intentionally and with malice aforethought kill a bunch of innocent people they don't even know in order to make a political point.

Although life without parole would work too, and keep open the remote possibility of new evidence suggesting this person actually didn't do it.

[conuly]

Not that life without parole is without its own problems. Honestly, the entire criminal justice system needs an overhaul from the ground up, in every single area.

[dewline]

As much as I have problems with the death penalty...I can't fault this choice in particular.

I still think that it would let these three off the hook too soon on this side of the grave to put them to death.

[rebeccmeister]

This was some good news to hear about, for a change.

[hudebnik]

True, it costs a lot and doesn't necessarily leave wrongdoers any better than they were, but it successfully keeps them away from everybody else, which is one of the stated goals of the system.

[conuly]

Yes. I'm not sure that most people with life sentences really need to be kept away from everybody else in what amounts to a very shitty old age home forever.

But, again, the entire system needs a full overhaul.

[thewayne]

It certainly screws over the incoming administration's plan to start executions post haste, for which I'm very happy.

I doubt Biden's going to meddle at the state level, for which I'm sad. I don't think he wants to be seen as wielding an iron fist.

[hudebnik]

Right: most 70-year-olds don't pose a major threat of violent crime, and it costs a lot of taxpayer dollars keeping them locked away. (And of course there are financial interests vested in getting their hands on those taxpayer dollars.)

OTOH, the act of putting people in prison for years, no matter why, damages them and makes them less capable of surviving in the real world. If we can figure out a way to not do that....

A lot of institutions in our society are based on dividing people into "good" and "bad". Once you've been ruled on the "bad" side, it's remarkably difficult to ever get back onto the "good" side; it's simpler for society to write you off as a hopeless loss. In reality, people are always a confusing, jumbled-up mix of good and bad, and that's harder to make rules about.

For example, the anti-gun-control people like to say "We can't infringe on the rights of law-abiding gun owners," as though "law-abiding" were an innate quality that some people have and others don't. But most of the mass-shooters you've heard of were "law-abiding gun owners" until the moment they opened fire in a school, a synagogue, a night club, a church, a grocery store, or wherever; the line between "law-abiding gun owner" and "mass murderer" takes only a few seconds to cross, and before law enforcement even hears about it, a bunch of people are dead.

[silveradept]

Yes, more would be good, but some is better than none, and it was looking like "none" was going to be the tally for these years.