Biden Contemplates Federal Commutation Requests

On November 25, 2024, President Joe Biden pardoned two Thanksgiving turkeys, an annual, symbolic tradition that highlights the president’s constitutional authority to issue pardons and commutations. Now, as President Biden sets to leave office in January 2025, 60 members of Congress and many others are urging him to grant clemency to the 40 men currently on federal death row. During his 2020 presidential campaign, President Biden said he would work to abolish the federal death penalty but there has been little evidence of anything done in furtherance of this promise. President Trump, on the other hand, has vowed to use and expand the federal death penalty when he resumes office.

A grant of clemency to some or all the federally death-sentenced men would not be unprecedented. President Biden would join a number of elected officials who have made similar mass grants of clemency for a variety of reasons. Since 1976, governors in eight states have commuted all death sentences under their authority, often citing systemic concerns. In 2003, Illinois Governor George Ryan cleared the state’s death row, commuting 167 death sentences to life in prison due to many wrongful convictions and systemic concerns about the fairness of the state’s death penalty system. Upon announcing his decision, Gov. Ryan said, “I started with this issue because I was and still am concerned about innocence, but once I studied, I pondered what had become of our justice system, I came to care above all about fairness. Fairness is fundamental to the American system of justice and to our way of life.” In 2011, the state of Illinois abolished the death penalty, and then-Governor Pat Quinn commuted the sentences of the 15 individuals remaining on death row to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Gov. Quinn said that when he signed the abolition bill, he meant to “abolish the death penalty for everyone,” including those already sentenced to death. 

Most recently, Oregon Governor Kate Brown commuted the death sentences of 17 prisoners on the state’s death row before leaving office in 2022, calling the death penalty “both dysfunctional and immoral.” Gov. Brown’s commutations completed what she characterized as “the near abolition of the death penalty” by the state legislature in 2019. At that time, the legislature amended its death penalty statute to significantly limit the crimes for which capital punishment can be imposed. In her statement announcing the commutations, Gov. Brown called the death penalty “an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction; is wasteful of taxpayer dollars; does not make communities safer; and cannot be and never has been administered fairly and equitably.” Gov. Brown said the commutations were “consistent” with the legislature’s effort to functionally end the death penalty.

In 1986, New Mexico Governor Toney Anaya commuted the death sentences of five prisoners on the state’s death row. Gov. Anaya said that he did this because he “consistently opposed capital punishment as being inhumane, immoral, anti-God, and incompatible with an enlightened society.” In 1991, before leaving office, Ohio Governor Richard Celeste commuted the death sentences of eight death row prisoners. Ahead of New Jersey’s abolition of the death penalty in 2007, Governor Jon Corzine commuted the death sentences of the eight individuals remaining on the state’s death row. Governor Martin O’Malley commuted the death sentences of four prisoners still on Maryland’s death row in 2015, after the legislature’s prospective abolition of capital punishment in 2013. In 2020, Colorado Governor Jared Polis commuted the death sentences of the three prisoners still on the state’s death row after the legislature’s prospective abolition of capital punishment.