Joe Biden, Merrick Garland Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
President Biden campaigned as an opponent of capitol punishment, and he nonetheless opposes the death penalty, the White House says. But you would be forgiven for not understanding that based mostly on the actions — and lack of motion — of his administration, The Associated Press reports Friday. “Biden hasn’t said whether he’d back a bill introduced by fellow Democrats to strike the death penalty from U.S. statutes. He also hasn’t rescinded Trump-era protocols enabling federal executions to resume and allowing prisons to use firing squads if necessary.”
And on Monday, the Justice Department requested the Supreme Court to reinstate the death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, arguing {that a} decrease courtroom was flawed to throw out the sentence based mostly on issues about jury choice and asking the excessive courtroom to “put this case back on track toward a just conclusion.”
“Biden’s lack of action is unconscionable,” Ashley Kincaid Eve, a lawyer and anti–death penalty activist, tells AP. “This is the easiest campaign promise to keep, and the fact he refuses to keep it … is political cowardice.”
Biden’s “hands-off approach” is “adding to disarray around the death penalty nationwide as pressure increases in some conservative states to find ways to continue executions amid shortages of the lethal-injection drugs,” AP reports. And some capital punishment opponents fear his silence provides the looks of tacit approval for revived state execution strategies like gas chambers and firing squads.
Biden believes the Justice Department “has independence regarding such decisions” because the Tsarnaev movement, White House spokesman Andrew Bates told AP, and he additionally “believes the department should return to its prior practice, and not carry out executions.”
There are issues Biden can do unilaterally, like commute all federal death sentences to life in jail, and he may inform the Justice Department to not schedule any extra executions whereas he is president. But the preliminary sense of optimism on death row about Biden’s presidency has dissipated, Rejon Taylor, an inmate on the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, told AP. “I won’t say that skepticism has settled in, but I will say that most no longer feel that immediate action will happen,” he mentioned, including that the majority inmates additionally do not consider they are going to be executed whereas Biden is president.
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