Days after President Biden controversially commuted the sentences of 37 prisoners, President-elect Trump pledged Monday to seek the death penalty for certain federal criminal defendants.
Biden’s move to reclassify death sentences as life sentences without the possibility of parole was heavily criticized by Republicans and many Democrats.
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President-elect Donald Trump points to America Fest in Phoenix on Sunday, December 22, 2024. On Monday, President Trump pledged to have the Justice Department pursue the death penalty following President Biden’s move to commute the death sentences of 37 inmates. (AP Photo/Rick Scutelli)
“As soon as I take office, I will vigorously push for the death penalty in the Department of Justice to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters,” President Trump said on his platform, Truth Social. I will instruct you to do so.” We will be a nation of law and order again! ”
In a message announcing the move, the White House said Biden’s actions would prevent the incoming Trump administration from carrying out “death sentences that would not be handed down under current policies and practices.”
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Only three federal death row inmates did not meet Biden’s requirements for commutation.
Tree of Life Synagogue gunman Robert Bowers killed 11 people in 2018. Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who murdered nine black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev worked with his late brother to carry out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings that killed three people and injured hundreds.
Trump’s press secretary, Stephen Chuen, said Monday that Biden’s actions were “a slap in the face to the victims, their families and loved ones.”
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Thirteen federal prisoners were put to death during President Trump’s first term, the most under any president in the last 100 years. Upon taking office in 2021, Biden declared a moratorium on federal executions.
