Death penalty: Joe Biden’s big gesture

One of President Joe Biden’s latest decisions was to commute the sentences of 37 death row inmates on Monday, December 23. Human rights organizations hailed this measure, which applies to an unprecedented number of inmates currently on death row.

Biden’s announcement, which is much more respectable than the highly controversial presidential pardon he granted to his son Hunter, who was prosecuted for illegal gun possession and tax fraud, is in line with the moratorium on federal executions enacted in his first year in office.

Biden’s decision concerns only federal death sentences. One of the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing, in 2013, and those responsible for two mass killings targeting a church frequented by African-Americans in Charleston, in 2016, and a synagogue in Pittsburgh, in 2018, were excluded. It comes as the number of executions, in steady decline from 1999 (95) to 2021 (11), has in recent years started to rise again in the US, with 25 death row inmates executed in 2024.

This is a regrettable development. True, a majority of Americans still support the death penalty according to converging polls, but this support is now the lowest measured since its reintroduction in 1976 (53 % in 2023, compared with 80% in 1996, according to Gallup Institute figures). And the arguments of abolitionists continue to gain ground. Clear majorities of Americans note that capital punishment disproportionately strikes African-Americans (56%), doubt its deterrent effect (63%) and above all fear, in light of revelations about miscarriages of justice, that it will be applied to innocent people (78%), according to 2021 results from the Pew Research Center.

Exception among Western countries

The rise in capital executions is being driven by states where the Republican Party has a majority, and where more than 2,250 condemned men await their fateful hour. Three-quarters of those executions are concentrated in three states: Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama, which has innovated by using death by inhaling nitrogen gas instead of lethal injections.

Donald Trump, the president-elect from the conservative ranks, has railed against Biden’s clemency and, as a fervent supporter of capital punishment, has promised to extend its scope to immigrants convicted of murdering American citizens, law enforcement officers and to drug and human traffickers. During his term, he had already put an end to a 17-year hiatus in federal executions.

If he keeps his word, the return to the White House of the man who has been promising for a decade to restore the US to its former greatness should keep the country among those who execute the most condemned people in the world. Of course, the US figures cannot be compared with the statistics for China and Iran, where death sentences are carried out in the hundreds. But, even if they are also lower than those of Saudi Arabia and Somalia, they make the US an unfortunate exception among Western countries.

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