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Progressive groups urge Biden to act before Trump restarts executions

By George Hale

Posted November 7, 2024

OK TO USE In this Dec. 10, 2019, file photo the guard tower flanks the sign at the entrance to the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind.

Federal death row is inside a secure facility in Terre Haute. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other progressive groups are calling on President Joe Biden to abolish the federal death penalty.

In an open letter, the organizations warn that president-elect Donald Trump is likely to restart federal executions, which have been on hold since 2021. Federal executions take place in Terre Haute.

Portions of the letter, which quoted the daughter of one of the victims of white supremacist’s Dylann Roof’s 2015 shooting at a black church in Charleston in 2015, were first published in Newsweek and circulated by death penalty opponents.

"Killing Dylann Roof would do nothing to help me heal, and in fact, just the experience of seeing his name in the news brings back all of the horror of his violence, returning us to the pain of that terrible day,” Sharon Risher was quoted as saying.

Legislation to abolish the federal death penalty has been stalled for years but Biden has the authority to grant clemency for federal prisoners. As head of the executive branch, he could commute any federal death sentence to life without parole.

During the 2020 presidential election, then candidate Biden campaigned on abolishing the federal death penalty, which he had helped expand during his time in the U.S. Senate.

After taking office, Biden’s attorney general Merrick Garland issued a moratorium on carrying out federal death sentences, which remains in place.

“We thought that was one step, you know, early-ish in the term that the Biden administration would then go on to take more action,” said Krisanne Vaillancourt, executive director of Catholic Mobilizing Network, which was one of the signatories to the letter.

“The Catholic Church believes that the death penalty is inadmissible. So, it’s no exceptions. It attacks the inviolable dignity of each person,” Vaillancourt says, and many American Catholics hope the president, who is a practicing Catholic, will do more during his presidency.

“He has a couple of months,” she said. “But before he leaves, he has constitutional authority for commutation, and those could include the 40 men on death row.”

Trump’s administration carried out 13 federal executions in 2020 and 2021 — more under a single administration in over a century.

At least as many prisoners currently on federal death row have completed final post-conviction appeals, making them eligible for execution after Inauguration Day.

Ahead of this year’s election, Trump vowed to restart executions on “day one.”