Ten days before President Joe Biden announced he was granting clemency to 1,500 convicted criminals who due to the pandemic had served out their sentences at home, soft-on-crime leftists including woke Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) were calling on him to “pardon” people who were on death row.
Bowman, who lost his primary campaign earlier this year, said in so many words at the time that if Biden was going to pardon his son, convicted felon Hunter Biden, then death row inmates should be given the same courtesy:
Other Democrat members of Congress including some of Bowman’s fellow Squad members also pushed for leniency from Biden:
In response, Biden is reportedly considering commuting the sentences of most of the 40 inmates who are on federal death row after meeting with the Pope and after pressure from religious groups and criminal justice advocates. If Biden follows through with it, the sentences would convert to life without parole:
Attorney General Merrick Garland, who oversees federal prisons, has recommended that Biden commute all but a handful of the sentences, the people familiar with the matter said, excepting a few terrorism and hate-crimes cases. The Justice Department had no immediate comment.Possible exceptions could include Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three and wounded more than 250 others, Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and Dylann Roof, who in 2015 killed nine at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.
The Wall Street Journal also cited family members of some murder victims, including the daughter of Mother Emanuel AME Church mass shooting victim Ethel Lance, as saying the death penalty does not give them peace of mind nor a “sense of justice.”
“The death penalty does not help victim family members. It doesn’t give us any sense of justice for the person to be executed,” Rev. Sharon Risher, an anti-death penalty activist, told the WSJ.
The details on some of the inmates whose sentences Biden may commute were, not surprisingly, pretty scary:
The federal death row roster includes Kaboni Savage, who was convicted of committing or ordering the deaths of 12 people including four children as a Philadelphia drug dealer, and Thomas Sanders, who in 2010 kidnapped and then shot 12-year-Lexis Roberts four times and cut her throat — after also murdering her mother.Others include Iouri Mikhel, who was convicted of murdering five Russian and Georgian immigrants after kidnapping them for ransom, and Jorge Avila-Torrez, who murdered two girls in 2005 and then a naval officer four years later.
Understandably, tough-on-crime proponents weren’t happy with the news:
Obviously, opinions on the death penalty vary. But I have to think of all the wounds that will be ripped open on family members who are in favor of capital punishment if Biden decides to go through with the commutations.
According to the WSJ story, we could know as soon as Christmas what Biden’s decision on this will be.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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