(December 9, 2024) Thousands of stakeholders from across the political and faith spectrums are calling on President Joe Biden to commute all federal death sentences before he leaves office. The group includes Black pastors, Catholics, former corrections officials, civil rights advocates, current and former prosecutors, families who have lost loved ones to homicide, pro-life conservatives, mental health advocates, business leaders, and more.
Their voices reflect the widespread, bipartisan concern about the death penalty system and a growing national shift away from capital punishment.
“The death penalty has for generations been a veiled extension of our national legacy of racial terror and lynchings,” said Jamila Hodge, CEO of Equal Justice USA. “President Biden has a historic opportunity to do the right thing by preventing an execution spree that will not make us safer, while moving us closer to reckoning with a system that unfairly targets Black people.”
Hodge also pointed out that the mere existence of a working death penalty — at the federal level and at the 27 states with statutes still on their books — consumes massive resources that could be used to build and expand community-led solutions proven to create safety and well-being.
Hodge and EJUSA join an alliance of leaders and activists who have released letters to the President today, which were also delivered to the White House in recent weeks and over the course of his presidency. They can be accessed here.
In a letter citing the harm executions pose to corrections staff, a group of 29 retired correctional professionals are urging the President to commute the federal row. “[W]e know first-hand the devastating toll executions take, not only on the correctional professionals directly involved in the process but on their families and on the larger correctional community,” they wrote. Commuting federal death sentences, they explained, will enable the Bureau of Prisons to prioritize rehabilitation and redemption of prisoners and the safety and security of staff. This group includes former directors of the correctional systems in California, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Washington, and Wyoming as well as other retired federal and state correctional officials.
“While we each have a unique story, our experience with the criminal justice system and our struggles with grief and trauma have united us in our opposition to the death penalty,” wrote a group of 166 family members of homicide victims. They urged President Biden to draw on his personal experience with loss, and stressed the profound harm the death penalty inflicts on family members who must endure a lengthy legal process that retraumatizes them and delays healing. “The death penalty does not prevent violence,” they wrote. “It does not solve crime. It divides families when we need each other the most, polarizing us, telling us that only some murders are heinous, and creating more trauma for more families.”
Please direct any media inquiries to Jon Crane, 203-982-4575, joncrane@criticalpr.com
