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.
