Biden had already courted controversy weeks ago, when he broke previous presidential records with 1,500 commutations and 40 pardons. At the time, there were reports Far Left radicals were lobbying the White House for Biden to show mercy on death row inmates before leaving office.
Among the killers spared a government-arranged execution are a cop killer named Daryl Lawrence and Jorge Avila-Torrez, who was convicted of killing a U.S. Navy petty officer in her barracks. He later pleaded guilty to stabbing two children to death, ages 8 and 9.
In a statement about his decision, President Biden said “I condemn these murderers” but insisted “I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.”
The Biden administration had announced a moratorium on capital punishment in 2021, which suspended executions during Biden’s term.
Randy Sutton, host of the “A Cop's Life” podcast, tells AFN everyone should be insulted, from the families of the victims to the police officers and prosecutors who put them behind bars.
“It's absolutely shocking,” Sutton says, “that this president would, as the very last act of his presidency, insult the American people, insult law enforcement, by commuting the sentences of some of the worst killers in America.”
Among other federal inmates spared execution is Anthony Battle, who beat a prison guard to death with ball-peen hammer, but one of the three inmates still awaiting execution is Dylann Roof, who killed nine church members while they sat during a church service in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015.
The other two inmates are Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Robert Bowers, who shot and killed 11 Jewish congregants in a Pittsburgh synagogue.
President Biden’s commutation was applauded by Anthony Romero, who leads the ACLU, who said Biden “stands for racial justice, humanity, and morality.”
It was not clear from Romero’s statement if the ACLU supports the pending executions of Roof, an avowed white supremacist, and Bowers, whose pending death by execution was the only one sought by the Biden administration.
