Death penalty opponents say Joe Biden betrayed a campaign promise — but it’s not too late

The defeat of Kamala Harris in the presidential election had a dual effect on her supporters, including those in DC tied to the issue-based groups that support the party.

On one hand, it effected a kind of malaise across a city now resigned to the return of Donald Trump and the likely erasure of many Democratic policy gains — meager as they were — made under four years of Biden’s presidency. Feelings of anger and despair are palpable as various factions of the party issue their respective postmortems, coming up with differing reasons for the party’s losses.

Another result of Harris’s defeat is a sudden push by those issue advocacy groups to solidify what progress can be made permanent within the next few weeks. The judiciary is one arena where this push is pronounced, as the Senate rushes to confirm judges before the Republican majority takes power in January.

The real focus for many, however, is on not the judges but those already within the federal prison system. Advocates of criminal justice reform who pushed (unsuccessfully) for the Biden administration to fully decriminalize possession of marijuana at the federal level are now holding out hope that the White House will commute the sentences of more nonviolent drug offenders before January 20. They’re especially hopeful in the wake of the president issuing a pardon for his son Hunter — despite promising repeatedly that he wouldn’t.

On death row, another more desperate argument is being made. The ACLU and other supporters of progressive reforms to the US justice system, remembering the effort by Trump to speed up federal executions in 2020 before he left office, are encouraging Biden to take the opposite approach and commute the sentences of some or all of those awaiting execution.

Cassy Stubbs, who directs the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, is clear: “The most important thing that we can all do...is calling on President Biden to commute the Row. The most important thing we can do is make it impossible for Donald Trump to carry out that kind of execution rate again.”

“Were we more hopeful that Biden would have been bold early in his administration? Yes,” she adds, in an interview with The Independent. “He did immediately — or under the DoJ, Merrick Garland did immediately — suspend executions. So that was a big change from Donald Trump’s term. But other than that, you know, we did not see the kind of bold action that his campaign had contemplated working to end the death penalty.”

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Many supporters of criminal justice reform say that the death penalty is an issue on which Biden has betrayed his own 2020 campaign promises, pointing to his low commutation rate as proof that the White House did not do all it could to move the issue.

His 2020 campaign website addressed the issue, according to records from Politifact: "Because we cannot ensure we get death penalty cases right every time, Biden will work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government's example."

But the incumbent president never used the White House’s bully pulpit to advocate for legislation in Congress to end the federal death penalty, even during his short-lived simultaneous Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. Legislation introduced under his term that would have done so died without floor votes in either chamber.

On Capitol Hill, the push for him to act in his final weeks is now winning support.

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“It’s less about the fact that the president pardoned his son and more about the fact that he's only really pardoning his son when there are, in fact, many people, including Leonard Peltier, as well as several other cases... who should be taken off death row, and who are facing the end of their lives if this president does not act,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told The Independent on Tuesday.

“I hope that we see far, far, far more commutations and clemencies that are provided because the current administration has issued a record-low number,” the New York congresswoman continued. “And what I would hate to see is President Biden leaving office with less commutations and clemency issuances than even President Trump provided.”

Biden has commuted the sentences of 131 people and pardoned 26 since taking office. His predecessor issued clemency to 237 people during his first presidency, including 143 pardons and 94 sentences commuted. A number of Trump’s pardon’s were political allies of his, including Steve Bannon, his former White House chief strategist. Biden’s most famous pardon was political, too — his own son had been charged with lying about his history of drug abuse on a form submitted while purchasing a firearm.

Yasmin Cader, director of the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality, said in a statement: “The death penalty is a morally bankrupt and inescapably racist institution. President Biden came into office committing to abolishing the federal death penalty because of its fundamental flaws. Commuting the federal row is the way he can honor that commitment, and prevent irreversible miscarriages of justice.”