Social media erupted on Monday after President Biden announced he would commute the sentences of nearly all the inmates on federal death row.
Of the 40 inmates on federal death row, according to DeathPenaltyInfo.org, Biden is commuting 37 individuals sentenced to death, reclassifying their sentences to life without the possibility of parole.
“Why did Biden commute the sentences of m*rderers and r*pists? Why?” Florida’s Voice assistant news director Eric Daugherty asked on X.
“Typical of whoever is actually president right now, the alleged Biden administration decided that the death penalty is immoral except when it’s not. He didn’t commute all the sentences but instead leaves a few leftist killer favorites standing. What a disgrace,” Townhall senior columnist Kurt Schlicter tweeted.
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Schlicter then suggested the decision would give President-elect Trump more “political standing” to pardon January 6 prisoners, calling it “possible good news” resulting from Biden’s “moral idiocy.”
Author Miranda Devine urged others not to let Biden “off the hook” by blaming the move on his administration and close allies.
“As a Catholic, I recognize performative Catholicism. Pure Biden. His ‘conscience’ requires him to commute death sentences for child killers but allows him to promote child killing in abortion. Makes sense in a macabre way,” she added.
Republican lawmakers were unsurprisingly outraged by the news.
“Once again, Democrats side with depraved criminals over their victims, public order, and common decency,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., wrote on x. “Democrats can’t even defend Biden’s outrageous decision as some kind of principled, across-the-board opposition to the death penalty since he didn’t commute the three most politically toxic cases. Democrats are the party of politically convenient justice.”
Pennsylvania Congressman Dan Meuser called the decision an “outrageous” example of the Biden administration’s “upside down and backward ideology.”
The three inmates not included in Biden’s commuting spree are Robert Bowers, who is responsible for the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, Dylann Roof, a White supremacist who killed nine Black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina, in 2015 and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who worked with his now-deceased brother to perpetuate the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured hundreds.
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“One just knew Biden was gonna do this: Commute the sentences of 37 murderers, including several multiple killers (one sentenced for involvement in 12 murders), but skip the three that would have caused a political problem,” Fox News contributor and Washington Examiner chief political correspondent Byron York tweeted in response to the news.
Biden, who only supports the death penalty at the federal level for “terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder,” said this move will prevent President-elect Donald Trump’s administration from “carrying out the execution sentences that would not be handed down under current policy and practice,” according to the White House statement.
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Among the list are convicted murderers who will now escape execution, including Marcivicci Barnette, who killed a man in a carjacking and his ex-girlfriend; co-defendants Brandon Basham and Chadrick Fulks, who kidnapped and killed a woman after escaping prison; Anthony Battle, who killed a prison guard; Jason Brown, who stabbed a postal worker to death; Thomas Hager, who committed a drug-related killing; David Runyon, who participated in the murder-for-hire plot of a Naval officer; Thomas Sanders, who kidnapped and killed a 12-year-old girl; Rejon Taylor, who carjacked, kidnapped and killed a restaurant owner; and Alejandro Umana, who killed two brothers inside a restaurant.
Fox News’ Elizabeth Pritchett contributed to this report.
