Catholic group urges Biden to commute federal death sentences before Trump takes office

CNA Staff, Nov 8, 2024 / 14:25 pm

A prominent Catholic anti-death penalty group is urging outgoing President Joe Biden to commute the sentences of the 40 people currently on federal death row in anticipation of the second term of President-elect Donald Trump, who strongly favors capital punishment. 

Catholic Mobilizing Network (CMN), an advocacy group founded in 2009, said in a statement posted Nov. 6 that the federal death penalty is a “broken” system that “does not deter crime or make communities safer.” 

In light of the upcoming jubilee year in the Catholic Church — a special holy year of grace and pilgrimage, emphasizing God’s mercy, that takes place every quarter-century — Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, CMN’s executive director, noted that Pope Francis has emphasized forgiveness and an end to the death penalty. 

Vaillancourt Murphy said the group has “begun mobilizing our national Catholic network to petition President Biden — in the spirit of mercy and the kind of justice that upholds the dignity of all life, no matter the harm one has caused or suffered — to commute the sentences of all 40 men currently on federal death row.”

“President Biden was the first president to campaign on abolishing the federal death penalty,”  Vaillancourt Murphy said. “Given that his lame-duck period converges with the beginning of Jubilee 2025, it is fitting that he should act on his faith and do what is squarely within his constitutional authority to do.” 

Biden’s commuting the sentences “could mark the beginning of the end of capital punishment in the United States,” Vaillancourt Murphy said. 

“We know approaches to the federal death penalty can change quickly under new leadership. Regrettably, President-elect Trump has a sordid history with executions,” she continued. 

Under then-president Trump, in July 2019 Attorney General William Barr announced that the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Prisons would resume federal executions after a hiatus of more than 15 years.

The announcement led to an outcry from Catholics, including the U.S. bishops, who reiterated that the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls the death penalty “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” 

“The Church’s opposition to the death penalty is clear, and we have made many requests that the federal government should not resume these executions. Yet, not only has the government done so, they have scheduled even more executions,” the U.S. bishops said in an August 2020 statement. 

All told, 13 inmates were executed in the final six months of Trump’s first term, including Lisa Montgomery, who murdered Bobbie Jo Stinnett in Missouri in 2004 in order to steal her unborn baby. Montgomery was the first woman to be executed by the federal government in nearly 70 years.

Biden called for an end to the use of the federal death penalty as a candidate for president, but that call marked a shift in position. According to the AP, in 1994, then-Sen. Biden helped pass laws that added 60 federal crimes that could be punished by death. 

In July 2021, under Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a moratorium on federal executions while the Department of Justice conducted a review of its policies and procedures to ensure the death penalty is being applied “fairly and humanely.” 

Despite overseeing the halting of new executions, the Biden administration has sought to uphold the death sentences of several prisoners already convicted, including the 2013 Boston Marathon Bomber. 

The administration also pursued the death penalty for the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue shooter, who was handed a capital sentence in 2023. The administration is still actively pursuing the death penalty for Payton Gendron, the then-18-year-old man who in 2022 killed nearly a dozen Black shoppers at a Tops Friendly Market grocery store in Buffalo, New York. His trial is expected to take place during the next Trump administration. 

A group of Democratic senators introduced the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act in 2021 in a bid to abolish federal capital punishment. That bill died in committee. The senators reintroduced the bill during the current session of Congress.

The federal death penalty has been applied relatively sparingly since being reinstated in 1988. Just 16 people have been put to death by the federal government — 13 during the first Trump administration — compared with nearly 1,600 by the states.