(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) Outgoing President Joe Biden is reportedly planning to commute the sentences of all federal death row inmates, in what appears to be an attempt to overshadow his controversial pardon of Hunter Biden.
The 40 individuals sentenced to the death penalty were convicted for some of the most heinous crimes in recent history, including child murder, rape, killing of police officers and terrorism.
The commutations, reported by The Wall Street Journal on Friday, come as Biden allegedly faces pressure from religious and civil rights groups opposing the death penalty.
Among the 40 death row inmates are Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber who killed three people and injured 264, and Dylann Roof, who murdered nine Black parishioners in the Emanuel AME Church massacre.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has pleaded with Biden not to commute the death sentences of individuals convicted for the worst offenses, including Tsarnaev, Roof and Robert Bowers, who murdered 11 people in a 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue.
If Biden commutes the death sentences, the individuals benefiting will still spend the rest of their lives in federal prison. A final decision is expected before Christmas.
“A principal question is whether the president should issue a blanket commutation of all the condemned men, or whether death sentences should remain for the most heinous convicts, these people said,” The Journal noted.
Biden may also commute the sentence of a man who killed two young girls and a female naval officer, a doctor who killed a patient to prevent her from speaking to investigators on a Medicare fraud probe and two men involved in a kidnapping-for-ransom plot that left five people dead.
Others include Brandon Council, who killed two bank employees during a robbery; Edward Fields, who fatally shot two campers on federal land; and Chadrick Fulks and Brandon Basham, who kidnapped and killed a woman after escaping from prison.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., rebuked Biden’s potential commutations during a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday.
“It would mean that progressive politics is more important to the president than the lives taken by these murderers,” McConnell said. “It would mean that society’s most forceful condemnation of white supremacy and antisemitism must give way to legal mumbo jumbo.”
The commutation plan comes less than a month after Biden controversially exploited his pardon powers to shield his son, Hunter, from accountability for offenses committed in 11 years. The pardon marked the first time in U.S. history a president has pardoned his own child and was the broadest pardon ever issued.
Critics suggest the pardon was a calculated move by Biden to shield himself from legal accountability ahead of the incoming Trump administration.
Following Hunter’s pardon, Biden granted nearly 1,500 pardons, including for a Chinese national convicted of child pornography and a woman who was accused of killing her two husbands and a former boyfriend. This set a record for the largest pardon issuance in American history.
Biden is also contemplating issuing preemptive pardons for some of President-elect Donald Trump’s fiercest critics for offenses that have yet to be unveiled.
