President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday repeated his pledge to “vigorously pursue” the death penalty, taking aim at President Joe Biden’s decision to commute the sentences of nearly all federal death row prisoners.
Trump also added to the backlash by some against Biden’s unprecedented move, which has stirred up both criticism and praise.
“Makes no sense,” Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social. “Relatives and friends are further devastated. They can’t believe this is happening!”
“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 continued. “We will be a Nation of Law and Order again!”
Biden announced on Monday that he will commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 federal inmates on death row to life sentences without the possibility of parole, saying he was “guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender.”
The action had been speculated for weeks as a broad coalition of criminal justice advocacy groups, former prosecutors and business leaders wrote letters to the White House asking for him to commute the sentences ahead of Trump’s taking office. Pope Francis this month also appealed to Biden, a Catholic, to commute the sentences; Biden is scheduled to meet with the pontiff next month in the last days of his presidency.
In a statement Monday, the president noted that the commutations are consistent with a moratorium on executions imposed by his administration after he took office, and that “in good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”
But Biden also made a point to decline the commutation of sentences of three federal death row inmates involved in mass killings: Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 people in the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018; Dylann Roof, who gunned down nine people at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who carried out a bombing attack at the Boston Marathon in 2013.
Despite sparing the lives of the other 37 inmates, Biden added: “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.”
Trump campaigned on expanding the federal death penalty following his first term, during which his Justice Department put 13 federal inmates to death — a high that had not been seen since Grover Cleveland’s presidency in the late 1800s.
Trump has since said he would like to expand capital punishment to include child rapists, migrants who kill U.S. citizens and law enforcement officers, and those convicted of drug and human trafficking. It’s unclear how the president-elect would do so, and legal experts argue it would require congressional support and face immense constitutional challenges.
Still, anti-death penalty advocates have said, they are taking Trump’s statements seriously.
Biden, meanwhile, is contending with criticism for his death row commutations, not only from his political adversaries but law enforcement groups and some families of victims.
“We thought the timing was despicable,” Tim Timmerman, whose 19-year-old daughter, Rachel, was killed in 1997, told NBC affiliate WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
His daughter’s convicted killer, Marvin Gabrion, is also accused of murdering Rachel Timmerman’s infant daughter, whose body was never found, and is the prime suspect in three other deaths. Gabrion is now 71.
“Where’s the justice in just giving him a prison bed to die comfortably in?” Timmerman said, adding, “It wasn’t me that gave Gabrion the death penalty. It was the jury, and I always think it’s important to point that out — that the jury are the people who sentenced Gabrion to the death penalty.”
The daughter of Donna Major, one of two South Carolina bank employees killed by federal death row inmate Brandon Council in 2017, slammed Council’s commutation as being unfair and an “abuse of power.”
“My mom’s murder is being used as a political game piece by a president who isn’t even fit for office,” Heather Turner posted Tuesday on Facebook. “I stand by my stance that Joe Biden has blood on his hands.”
While Biden is being lauded by anti-death penalty groups who have long maintained that the death penalty process is tainted, in part, because of racial disparities among who is sentenced to death and executed, some also believe he did not go far enough by failing to commute all federal death row inmates as well as the four inmates on U.S. military death row.
The Rev. Sharon Risher, the board chair of Death Penalty Action whose mother, Ethel Lance, and cousins, Tywanza Sanders and Susie Jackson, were among those killed in the 2015 Charleston shooting, said in a statement that “politics has gotten in the way of mercy.”
“You can’t rank victims, Mr. President. I am begging you to finish the job, not only with the three men left on federal death row, but also with those on the military death row,” Risher said. “There’s still time.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
