In the latest in a series of shameful closing acts, President Joe Biden on Sunday night commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 murderers on federal death row.
Biden’s midnight decision spared the lives of all but the three most notorious capital inmates: the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter, the Emmanuel AME Church shooter, and the surviving Boston Marathon bomber.
In his statement on the commutations, Biden said he was “more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.” It’s clear, then, that he only stopped short of a blanket commutation because of the backlash that would have come with pardoning these three mass murderers.
Make no mistake: Biden’s choice to spare the remaining 37 murderers is a moral travesty. In so doing, the lame duck president has once again shown that he is more beholden to progressive dogmas than to the pursuit of justice.
That’s obvious when you look at the killers Biden spared. Take Daniel Troya and Ricardo Sanchez, Jr., who murdered a family of four in cold blood, including three-year-old Luis Damian Escobedo and four-year-old Luis Julian Escobedo. Or consider Jorge Avila-Torrez, who murdered eight-year-old Laura Hobbs and nine-year-old Krystal Tobias in 2005. Avila-Torrez then joined the Marines, strangled U.S. Navy petty officer Amanda Jean Snell to death, and abducted and assaulted two more women before finally being apprehended.
Nine of those with commuted sentences were on death row for killing other people in prison. If capital punishment is not an option for such offenses, then there is no deterrence for prison homicides—and therefore no guarantee of safety for the incarcerated.
Just because these cases were not high-profile does not mean that the crimes were not monstrous. The death penalty is handed out sparingly in the United States; in 2023, just 21 new capital sentences were imposed nationwide. When it is applied, it’s done for important reasons.
But none of this matters to the progressive pro-crime groups that pressured Biden into the pardon. Indeed, the ACLU cheered the news Monday morning, calling it a “historic and courageous step” toward “outlawing the barbaric practice once again.”
Under the confused moral theory of death-penalty abolitionists, taking the life of someone who murders children is “barbaric.” Where, one might ask, were their condemnations of the murders in the first place? The answer, of course, is that they regard the lives of criminals as more worthy of their attention than the lives of the innocent.
This same lawless attitude is what drove Biden’s earlier mass commutation of 1,500 federal inmates serving time in home confinement under a Covid-era program. Those now walking free thanks to Biden include pill-mill doctors and a judge who made $2.1 million in kickbacks for locking up children in juvenile detention.
Both commutations were motivated by the idea that the criminal justice system, and punishment itself, are bad. A consideration that heinous criminals deserve to be punished appears nowhere in that calculus.
Fortunately, the American public disagrees. Most Americans believe that the death penalty is morally justified, and majorities have consistently endorsed its use for murderers. They know that some crimes are so monstrous as to deserve the ultimate retribution.
Biden’s mockery must become an opportunity to renew our collective commitment to serving justice. President-elect Trump should move swiftly to carry out the sentences of the three remaining prisoners on federal death row, and death-penalty abolition states should revisit their bans on capital punishment.
In so doing, they will be following the will of the people—not of the few who think that justified punishment is worse than crime.
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