Growing Chorus of Advocates and Innocence Organizations Call on President Biden to Commute All Federal Death Sentences

More than 100 influential business leaders also call for federal capital clemency: “We have an interest in good governance, stability, social cohesion, and fairness. The death penalty undermines all of these values.” They also stress that the death penalty does not make our communities safer, wastes limited public resources, perpetuates inequality and racial injustice, and “damag[es] the standing of the United States as a champion of human rights, fairness, and equal justice in the world.” This group includes Sir Richard Branson, the Founder of Virgin Group, Andrew Liveris, the former CEO of Dow Chemical, Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever, Sheryl Sandberg, Founder of Lean In, and many others.

“While we each have a unique story, our experience with the criminal justice system and our struggles with grief and trauma have united us in our opposition to the death penalty,” writes a group of 166 family members of homicide victims. They urge President Biden to draw on his personal experience with loss, and stress the profound harm the death penalty inflicts on family members who must endure a lengthy legal process that retraumatizes them and delays healing. “The death penalty does not prevent violence,” they write. “It does not solve crime. It divides families when we need each other the most, polarizing us, telling us that only some murders are heinous, and creating more trauma for more families.” 

Stressing their commitment to a consistent pro-Life ethic from conception to natural death, another group of advocates joined in the call for President Biden to commute all federal death sentences. “Human life, no matter the circumstances, is worthy of protection. There is no amount of judicial process that can overcome the truth that the death penalty is the purposeful taking of a human being’s life.”

Many of these groups direct President Biden’s attention to the risk of executing an innocent person. Bringing this issue into stark relief, a group of 20 death row exonerees points to their combined 230 years behind bars for crimes they did not commit. “We are living proof that the death penalty poses too much risk of executing an innocent person,” they write. The Innocence Project describes this risk as “both intolerable and all too real,” noting that in the five years since President Biden himself acknowledged the fallibility of the death penalty, “20 additional individuals who were sentenced to death in this country were exonerated,” and others who were likely innocent have been executed. 

While acknowledging that people convicted of federal capital crimes must be—and will continue to be—held accountable for their actions, and expressing sympathy for the families of homicide victims, dozens of current and former state and federal prosecutors urge President Biden to commute the federal death row. They explain: “unlike what we might want to believe, we know that we have not always executed the worst of the worst, but often instead put to death the unluckiest of the unlucky—the impoverished, the poorly represented, and the most broken. Time and again, we have executed people with long histories of debilitating mental illness, childhoods marred by unspeakable physical and mental abuse, and intellectual disabilities that have prevented them from leading independent adult lives. We have also likely executed the innocent.” These prosecutors also stress that “the way that the death penalty has been carried out in our country raises serious concerns that it has not been applied consistent with our constitutional ban against cruel and unusual punishment and the guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law.”

The Arc of the United States, the country’s largest organization of and for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, writes “with urgency” to ask the President to commute federal death sentences. “Based on what we know about the federal death penalty as it affects people with intellectual disability, we urge you to show mercy and, consistent with the platform on which you ran for President, act to spare the lives of those with intellectual disability currently on federal death row.”

Along the same lines, The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) notes in a letter sent to Attorney General Garland that “[a]pproximately half of all people on federal death row exhibit signs of serious mental illness,” and many have “documented histories of extensive trauma and abuse.” NAMI expresses concerns about the failure of the legal system to adequately consider the impact of mental illness on cognition, conduct, and culpability, and urges the President to use his clemency power to address this systemic problem.

Other letters released today are from Human Rights Watch and a group of European organizations, who co-signed a letter by Sabrina Butler-Smith, the first woman exonerated from death row in the United States. Similar calls have been mounting from a diverse array of individuals and groups since the election.

These pleas for President Biden to commute federal death sentences come as overall support for the death penalty has fallen to a five-decade low.  

Collectively, these letters make clear that the temporary pause on executions put in place by the Biden Administration in July 2021 is not enough to fulfill President Biden’s promise to end the death penalty at the federal level, a pledge he made in the wake of the spree of executions carried out in the final seven months of the Trump Administration. 

During that time, the federal government executed 12 men and 1 woman despite serious concerns about their cases including intellectual disability, mental incompetency, racial bias, prosecutorial misconduct and the use of flawed forensic evidence, unfair sentencing disparities, and more. Many of the letters made public today express horror at these problematic executions. These groups all agree that only commuting the entire federal death row will prevent another such bloodbath in the future and mark a meaningful step towards remedying the injustices of the federal death penalty system.

From their different perspectives, each of these groups stress that the federal death penalty system is broken beyond repair. They urge President Biden to secure his legacy as a leader on racial justice, violence prevention, and social change by granting clemency to the 40 men on federal death row.

Facts and figures about racial bias and other serious problems with the federal death penalty system can be accessed here.

Information about the 13 executions carried out by the Trump Administration in 2020-2021 can be accessed here.