Trump on Monday criticized Biden’s decision to commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 condemned men to prison without parole, arguing it was irrational and an insult to their victims’ families. Biden said commuting their sentences to life in prison would be consistent with a federal moratorium on the death penalty in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.
“Joe Biden just sentenced 37 of our nation’s worst murderers to death,” he wrote on his social media site. “When you hear the actions of each one, you will not believe that he did it. There is no meaning. Relatives and relatives are even more frightened. They can’t believe this is happening!”
Presidents have historically had no involvement in directing or recommending sentences that federal prosecutors seek for defendants in criminal cases, although Trump has long sought more direct control over the operation of the Justice Department. The president-elect wrote that he would direct the department to move forward with the death penalty “as soon as I am inaugurated” but was vague about what specific actions he might take, saying they would be in cases of “violent rapists, murderers, and monsters.”
He highlighted the case of two men on federal death row for the murders of a woman and a girl, who confessed to more murders and had their sentences commuted by Biden.
Is it speed planning or more rhetoric? On the campaign trail, Trump often called for expanding the federal death penalty — including those who kill police officers, those convicted of drug and human trafficking, and immigrants who kill U.S. citizens.
“Trump wants to sort of say that he thinks the death penalty is an important tool and that he wants to use it,” said Douglas Berman, a sentencing expert at Ohio State University Law School. “But practically any of that could be, under existing laws or other laws, a heavy lift.”
Berman said at this point Trump’s statement appears to be merely a response to Biden’s transformation.
“I’m inclined to think that it’s still very much in the rhetorical stage. Just, ‘Don’t worry. A new sheriff is coming. I like the death penalty,’ he said.
Most Americans have historically supported the death penalty for people convicted of murder, according to decades of annual polling by Gallup, but support has declined over the past few decades. Nearly half of Americans in an October poll were in favor, while 7 in 10 Americans supported the death penalty for murderers in 2007.
Death row inmates are often executed by states Before Biden’s conversion, there were 40 federal death row inmates that were executed by more than 2,000 states.
“The reality is that all of these crimes are usually handled by the states,” Berman said.
One question is whether the Trump administration will try to seize some cases of state murder, such as drug trafficking or smuggling. He could also try to take cases from states that have abolished the death penalty.
Can the rapist be sentenced to death? Berman said that Trump’s statement, along with some recent actions by states, may represent an attempt by the Supreme Court to reconsider the unequal punishment of the death penalty for rape.
“It’s literally going to take decades to unfold. It’s not going to happen overnight,” Berman said.
Before one of Trump’s rallies on August 20, he announced in prepared remarks released to the media that he would seek the death penalty for child rapists and traffickers. But Trump didn’t deliver the line.
What were the cases highlighted by Trump? One of the men Trump highlighted Tuesday was former Marine Jorge Avila Torrez, who was sentenced to death in Virginia for killing a sailor and later pleaded guilty to the fatal stabbings of an 8-year-old and a 9-year-old girl. Several years ago in a suburban Chicago park.
Another man, Thomas Steven Sanders, was sentenced to death for kidnapping and killing a 12-year-old girl in Louisiana days after shooting the girl’s mother at a wildlife park in Arizona. Court records show he confessed to both murders.
Some of the victims’ families expressed outrage at Biden’s decision, but the president faced pressure from advocacy groups urging Trump to make it more difficult to increase the use of the death penalty for federal inmates. The ACLU and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops were among the groups that applauded the decision.
Biden left three federal inmates facing the death penalty. They are Dylann Roof, who in 2015 racially murdered nine black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Robert Bowers, who shot 11 congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history.