As President Biden prepares to leave office, he has indicated that he is commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 inmates on federal death row.
Biden has indicated in the past that he was against the death penalty, however, his position has now evolved to allow the federal death penalty for certain categories of mass murder.
Murders based on a person’s race because of hate or a racist ideology toward a particular race, murders based on a person’s religion and murders based on inflicting terror on Americans fit that category.
Let us look at who Biden kept on death row and the possible reasons why he kept them on death row.
Robert D. Bowers, 52. Sentenced in 2023 in Pennsylvania. Convicted and sentenced to death for gunning down 11 worshipers in a mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
It would appear that Biden wanted to send a message that those who commit mass murder or murder because of religious hatred will receive the death penalty.
Dylann Roof, 30. Sentenced in 2017 in South Carolina. Convicted and sentenced for opening fire in 2015 on parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, killing nine people. Roof was self-radicalized as a white supremacist and revealed his purpose in a racist manifesto.
Biden seems to have decided to keep him on death row as a message to future white supremacists, who follow a racist ideology against Black people, that if they commit murder against Black people or people of color based on hate of a person’s race, they will face the death penalty.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 31. Sentenced in 2015 in Massachusetts. Convicted for carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 and sentenced to death for killing two; a total of three people were killed from injuries sustained from the attack by Tsarnaev and his brother, who was killed by the police in a manhunt after the bombing. More than 200 people were injured.
Biden wanted to send a message that anyone who committed a terrorist act that killed average Americans will receive the death penalty.
Biden has also directed that his justice department pursue the death penalty for Payton Gendron because he killed 10 Black people in a racist- and hate-motivated mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket in 2020.
Again, Biden wants to send a message that for a federal crime that result in the murder of American citizens because of hate of the person’s race, hate of a person’s religious affiliation or a terrorist murder of American citizen because of a perceived wrong that America has committed and they wanted to commit a terrorist act against America and American citizens.
Perhaps this was Biden’s analysis upon why he kept these three on death row and possibly putting a fourth one on death row.
Americans should always apply the death penalty to adjudicated murders or mass murders who have committed federal murder based on the victim’s race, religious beliefs or on a citizen of a country that the terrorist believes should be punished.
Again, if this was Biden’s message that he wanted to convey pertaining to his decisions, it would seem appropriate.
