Joe Biden has commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 federal death row inmates, changing their punishment to life imprisonment without parole.
The decision follows mounting pressure from campaigners who warned that the president-elect, Donald Trump, backs the death penalty and restarted federal executions during his first term after a 17-year hiatus.
“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden said in a statement released on Monday.
“But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, vice-president, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”
Related: After Biden pardoned his son, advocates call on him to grant clemency for others
It is the highest number of death sentences commuted by any president in the modern era. Among those spared is Len Davis, a former New Orleans police officer who masterminded a drug protection ring involving several other officers and arranged the murder of a woman, Kim Groves, who filed a brutality complaint against him.
Davis also helped send three men to prison for more than 28 years before they were found to have been wrongfully convicted of murder and freed in 2022.
During a brief interview Monday, Groves’s son Corey hailed Biden’s commutation of Davis’s death sentence, saying he always wanted the former officer to live as long as possible in prison. “I would like Len to wake up on his his 95th birthday and still be looking at concrete and barbed wire,” said Groves, who received a $1.5m settlement from the New Orleans city government in 2018 along with other family members over his mother’s murder. “I think that’s worse than any death sentence, so I don’t have any problem with what the president did.”
There is also a commutation for Norris Holder, who was sentenced to death for a two-man bank robbery during which a security guard died. Prosecutors said Holder may not have fired the fatal shot.
Another beneficiary is Daryl Lawrence, sentenced to death in the killing of Columbus, Ohio, police officer Bryan Hurst. Hurst’s former police partner Donnie Oliverio said in a statement: “Putting to death the person who killed my police partner and best friend would have brought me no peace. The president has done what is right here, and what is consistent with the faith he and I share.”
The clemency action applies to all federal death row inmates except three convicted of terrorism or hate-motivated mass murder: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted of carrying out the 2013 Boston marathon bombing attack; Dylann Roof, who shot dead nine Black church members in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Robert Bowers, who stormed a synagogue in the heart of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community and killed 11 worshippers in 2018.
The majority of the 40 men held on federal death row are people of color, and 38% are Black, Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, previously told the Guardian. Nearly one in four men were 21 or younger at the time of the crime.
Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative, said: “Today marks an important turning point in ending America’s tragic and error-prone use of the death penalty. By commuting almost all federal death sentences, President Biden has sent a strong message to Americans that the death penalty is not the answer to our country’s concerns about public safety.”
Martin Luther King III, the son of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, added: “This is a historic day. By commuting these sentences, President Biden has done what no president before him was willing to do: take meaningful and lasting action not just to acknowledge the death penalty’s racist roots but also to remedy its persistent unfairness.”
Biden’s journey on the issue has been complicated. As a senator, he championed a 1994 crime bill that expanded the federal death penalty to cover 60 new offences. He boasted: “I am the guy who put these death penalties in this bill.” The legislation is now widely seen as having contributed to mass incarceration, particularly affecting Black men, and many of those currently on death row were sentenced under its provisions.
But during his 2020 presidential election campaign, Biden reversed his long-held support for capital punishment, pledging to eliminate it at the federal level. He cited concerns about wrongful convictions and racial disparities in the justice system.
The Biden administration duly imposed a moratorium on federal executions. Calls for the president to commute the federal death sentences mounted in recent weeks. He received letters from corrections officials, business leaders, Black pastors, Catholics, civil and human rights advocates, prosecutors, former judges, victim family members and others. Pope Francis publicly offered a prayer for those on federal death row, urging Biden to extend mercy to them.
The White House said Biden’s latest action would prevent the next administration from carrying out the execution sentences that would not be handed down under current policy and practice.
Under Trump, more people incarcerated in the federal system were put to death than under the previous 10 presidents combined. The Republican’s administration ended a pause of 17 years when it executed Daniel Lewis Lee, and followed that with six more executions between 16 July and 24 September 2020.
Two Democrats who sponsored bicameral legislation to ban the use of the death penalty at the federal level welcomed Monday’s announcement.
The Senate majority whip, Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate judiciary committee, said: “I have long advocated for the abolition of the federal death penalty and commend President Biden for this act of justice and mercy and for his leadership.”
Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts praised Biden’s move as a “historic and groundbreaking act of compassion that will save lives, address the deep racial disparities in our criminal legal system, and send a powerful message about redemption, decency, and humanity”.
According to the White House, Biden has issued more commutations at this point in his presidency than any of his recent predecessors at the same point in their first terms. Earlier this month he announced clemency for about 1,500 Americans – the most ever in a single day – who have shown successful rehabilitation and a commitment to making communities safer.
Biden is also the first president to issue categorical pardons to individuals convicted of simple use and possession of marijuana and to former LGBTQ+ service members convicted of private conduct because of their sexual orientation.
Earlier this month the president sparked a political outcry by pardoning his son, Hunter, for federal felony gun and tax convictions that could have led to a prison sentence. Biden, who leaves office on 20 January, had repeatedly promised not to issue such a pardon.
Additional reporting by Oliver Laughland, Sam Levin and Ramon Antonio Vargas
