President Joe Biden is reportedly considering commuting the sentences of dozens of federal death row inmates.
With just a few weeks left in his term, President Biden could commute most, if not all, of the 40 men on the federal government’s death row. A decision could come by Christmas.
Sources familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal that Attorney General Merrick Garland recommended to Biden that he commute all but a handful of sentences.
Possible exceptions to commuted sentences include Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber who killed three and wounded more than 250; Dylann Roof, who killed nine at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015; and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Biden is the first president to openly oppose capital punishment. In 2021, he considered an executive order on it but did not end up issuing one.