A spokesman for President-elect Donald Trump expressed his distaste for President Joe Biden‘s decision to commute the sentences of 37 prisoners on federal death row.
“These are among the worst killers in the world and this abhorrent decision by Joe Biden is a slap in the face to the victims, their families, and their loved ones,” Trump communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement.
“President Trump stands for the rule of law, which will return when he is back in the White House after he was elected with a massive mandate from the American people,” Cheung concluded.
In the final months of his first term, Trump took the opposite approach to the death penalty as Biden did, overseeing the execution of 13 death row inmates. In his Monday statement announcing his decision, Biden acknowledged the difference in his and Trump’s stances.
“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,” Biden said.
He additionally said the commutations are “consistent with the moratorium my Administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”
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During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden vowed to abolish the federal death penalty but did not achieve that goal. During his 2024 campaign, Trump called for tougher criminal sentences for drug traffickers, such as the death penalty, echoing calls he made in 2018 when he said there should be the “ultimate penalty” for drug dealers.
Biden did leave three men on death row, all of whom were responsible for massacres. Those three were Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black parishioners in Charleston in 2015, Robert Bowers, who murdered 11 Jewish congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one brother behind the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured hundreds more.
