CNN
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President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday he will direct the Justice Department to “aggressively pursue the death penalty” after President Joe Biden on Monday commuted the death sentences of 37 federal inmates to life in prison.
“Once I am inaugurated, I will direct the Department of Justice to aggressively pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters. We will be a nation of law and order again!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, echoing his long-standing call for the use of the death penalty, which was part of His tough-on-crime rhetoric during the 2024 campaign.
Following Biden’s decision to commute the sentences of most federal death row inmates — which Trump called on Truth Social “illogical” — there will be only three individuals in federal prison facing the death penalty when the president-elect takes office in January.
The remaining three cases are all individuals who committed mass shootings or terrorist attacks: Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018; Dylann Roof, a white nationalist who killed nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the brothers responsible for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
Biden’s clemency decisions cannot be reversed when Trump takes office, but the president-elect’s Justice Department could resume seeking the death penalty in future cases.
Throughout his campaign, Trump’s call for increased use of the death penalty was part of his tough commitment to reducing violent crime and drug and human trafficking. In his speech launching his 2024 presidential campaign, he pledged to seek the death penalty for drug traffickers. He said last year Congress will be required to pass a law That “anyone caught trafficking children across our borders” should receive the death penalty.
During the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly vowed to push for the death penalty for any immigrant who kills a U.S. citizen or law enforcement officer.
There were mixed reactions to Biden’s commutation on Monday. While some families of those whose sentences were commuted expressed relief, some families of the victims expressed anger. The widow of Brian Hurst, the Ohio police officer killed in 2005 by Darrell Lawrence, whose sentence was commuted Monday, said in a statement provided to CNN affiliate WBNS that her family is disappointed by Biden’s decision.
Lawrence “made a decision to choose violence. “He knew the potential consequences and chose to kill regardless,” Marissa Gibson said in her statement. “All I can hope is that the 20 years he spent in prison made him a changed man.”
Executions carried out by the US government were uncommon before Trump’s first term. Only three federal executions had been carried out since 1988 before Trump’s then-Attorney General William Barr announced in 2019 that the federal government would resume executions.
In 2020, the final year of Trump’s first term, the federal government executed 10 individuals, the largest number of executions carried out by the federal government since 1896 and more than all 50 states combined that year.
Outside the federal system, there are more than 2,000 people in the United States who have been convicted in state courts and are awaiting execution, according to a report published by the British newspaper “Daily Mail”. Death Penalty Information Center. Biden does not have the ability to stop these death sentences.
