President-elect Donald Trump slammed President Joe Biden on Tuesday for commuting the death sentences of 37 federal prisoners in an act of holiday clemency.
Trump said relatives of victims are angry that Biden spared the lives of some of the “worst killers in our country,” including inmates convicted in the slayings of police and military officers, as well as murders involved in deadly robberies and drug deals.
“When you hear the acts of each, you won’t believe that he did this. Makes no sense,” Trump wrote on his social media site. Relatives and friends are further devastated. They can’t believe this is happening!”
Trump, a vocal death penalty advocate, won’t be able to reverse the commutations. But he vowed to aggressively push for future federal death sentences when he returns to the White House Jan. 20.
“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,” Trump wrote.
Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 out of 40 federal death row inmates. They will instead face life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
He left three inmates on federal death row: Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black parishioners at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of life Synagogue in 2018; and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Biden explained his decision by noting that his administration has imposed a moratorium on federal executions except in cases of “terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”
“I cannot stand by and let a new administration resume executions that I halted,” Biden tweeted.
Relatives of most, but not all the victims, denounced Biden’s Christmas week decision to spare the killers.
Tim Timmerman, whose daughter, Rachel, was thrown into a Michigan lake in 1997 to keep her from testifying in a rape trial, said Biden’s decision to commute the killer’s sentence offered families “only pain.”
“Where’s the justice in just giving him a prison bed to die comfortably in?” Timmerman said.
But Donnie Oliverio, a retired Ohio police officer whose partner, Bryan Hurst, was murdered, said the killer’s execution “would have brought me no peace.”
“The president has done what is right here,” Oliverio said in a statement.
Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU, said in a statement that Biden has shown “the brutal and inhumane policies of our past do not belong in our future.”