Donald Trump has lashed out at President Joe Biden’s commutation of nearly every federal death row prisoner’s sentence in a Christmas Eve outburst.
Less than a month before Trump takes office, Biden on Monday removed 37 people from death row who were all convicted of murder charges, meaning they will now serve life imprisonment without parole.
“Joe Biden just commuted the Death Sentence on 37 of the worst killers in our Country,” Trump fumed on Truth Social on Christmas Eve morning.
“When you hear the acts of each, you won’t believe that he did this. Makes no sense. Relatives and friends are further devastated. They can’t believe this is happening!”
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Trump vowed to take action as soon as he takes office.
“As soon as I am inaugurated, I will direct the Justice Department to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters,” he said in a follow up post. “We will be a Nation of Law and Order again!”
Trump supports the death penalty and has suggested more people should be given death sentences — though he has not offered specifics. The president-elect restarted federal executions after a 17-year pause during his first term, with 13 being carried out.
Biden said he was issuing the 37 commutations because “in good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”
“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.”
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The three people who remain on death row have sentences related to terrorism or hate-motivated mass murder.
They are Robert D. Bowers, 52, who was sentenced in 2023 for killing 11 people during the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018; Dylann Roof, 30, who was sentenced in 2017 for killing nine people during a white-supremacist motivated mass shooting in South Carolina; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 31, who was sentenced in 2015 for carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing.
The president’s announcement also comes less than two weeks after he commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 people who were released from prison and placed on home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic, and of 39 others convicted of nonviolent crimes, the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history.
The move by Biden has received mixed reactions from the families of victims.
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Carol Downing, whose family members were injured in the Boston Bombing, was “happy” to see that Tsarnaev remains on death row. “If [the president] lets him off, I am going to be livid,” Downing told WBUR. “I was very happy to see that he had not pardoned him.”
Donnie Oliverio, a retired Ohio police officer whose partner was killed by one of the men whose death sentence was converted, meanwhile said the execution of “the person who killed my police partner and best friend would have brought me no peace.”
“The president has done what is right here,” Oliverio said in a statement also issued by the White House, “and what is consistent with the faith he and I share.”
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