Will Biden Commute the Sentences of 40 People on Death Row?

Five days after Orlando Hall was executed in November 2020 in the federal death chamber, Donald Trump appeared in the White House Rose Garden for the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon ceremony. The enormous white birds, Corn and Cob, stood ridiculously as Trump wished them a “very long, happy, and memorable life.” At the Special Confinement Unit inside the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, men on death row watched news coverage on TV.

It felt like a sick joke. “He could have used his pardon/clemency powers to spare any one of the five human beings facing imminent execution,” one man later wrote to me. But the executions that had started that summer showed no signs of slowing down. Some who had watched their neighbors taken to die over the previous months still dared to hope that the next man, Brandon Bernard, might be spared. “I’m cautiously optimistic,” one of them wrote a week later. “Perhaps President Trump will show an uncharacteristic display of humanity.”

But there would be no such display. By the time Joe Biden arrived in the Oval Office in 2021, 13 people had been killed in the federal death chamber. It was an unprecedented killing spree: more executions over six months than over the previous 10 presidential administrations combined.

Collectively, the 12 men and one woman executed in Terre Haute had been convicted of heinous crimes. But they also revealed the ugly face of the federal death penalty, which is wrongly assumed to apply only to terrorists or mass murderers — the ultimate “worst of the worst.” Most were human beings whose lives had been indelibly shaped by childhood abuse and neglect. Many had lawyers who disastrously failed them. Others had an intellectual disability or severe mental illness. More than one swore he was innocent; another was executed despite playing a marginal role in the crime that sent him to die. One man was executed over the loud objections of the victim’s family.

The executions were pushed through lawlessly, in the first year of the Covid pandemic, long before a vaccine was available. Prison staff, attorneys, journalists, a spiritual adviser, and the condemned men themselves contracted the virus as the executions went on — an emblem of Trump’s recklessness, chaos, and cruelty.

But in truth, the executions were also the result of a long bipartisan project, much of it led by Biden himself. It was not just that Democrats were responsible for dramatically expanding the federal death penalty, although that is certainly true. Of the 13 people executed by Trump, 10 had previously filed a clemency application to the Obama administration. His refusal to act set them up for execution.

Now a growing chorus of people is urging Biden not to make the same mistake. “We’re dealing with a very different world this time,” said veteran death penalty lawyer Ruth Friedman, head of the Federal Capital Habeas Project. “People know this is a possibility because they see what has played out.”

The Cost of Doing Nothing

With just 54 days before he leaves the White House, Biden’s window for using his clemency power is rapidly closing. A majority of the 40 people on federal death row have filed requests for their death sentences to be commuted to life. While the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney processes applications and makes recommendations, the president can also unilaterally grant clemency to whomever he sees fit.

Hundreds of advocacy organizations, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Catholic Mobilizing Network, have called on Biden to grant mass commutations to everyone on federal death row. The abolitionist group Death Penalty Action, which protested each execution in Terre Haute, is urging Biden to demolish the death house as well. The flurry of letters and petitions cite reasons ranging from persistent evidence of racial bias — the majority of those on federal death row are people of color — to a lack of evidence that the death penalty deters crime. Public support for the death penalty has also steadily dropped for years; at the time of Trump’s execution spree, it had reached historic lows. The well-documented risk of executing innocent people is at least one explanation.

Biden, of course, knows all of this. When he ran for president on an anti-death penalty platform in 2020, his plan for criminal justice reform cited death-row exonerations as one reason he would fight to pass legislation to end the federal death penalty. Those under a federal death sentence “should instead serve life sentences without probation or parole,” it said. Many are simply asking Biden to make good on this vow.

But the most pressing reason for Biden to act is the cost of doing nothing. There is no reason to doubt that Trump will continue what he started on his way out of the White House. Along with his repeated vows to expand the death penalty, the road map laid out in Project 2025 includes “finality” for the remaining 40 people on federal death row. The only way to guarantee that Trump is unable to push through another execution spree is to commute the sentences of those who remain.

“You Are Playing a Part in This”

Four years before the Trump administration executed him around Thanksgiving, Orlando Hall had appealed to President Barack Obama for clemency. When I met his partner Shanyce Matthews weeks after his execution, she told me her family had been thrilled when Obama won the 2008 election. Although he supported the death penalty, she found herself hopeful that Hall might stand a chance to have his sentence commuted.

She knew it was a long shot. There was no denying that Hall’s crime was horrific. In 1994, he and a group of men abducted, raped, and murdered a 16-year-old girl named Lisa René in Arlington, Texas — part of a botched drug operation that spiraled violently out of control. Hall became one of the first men sentenced to die under the 1994 crime bill.

Nonetheless, there were serious problems with his case. Hall, who was Black, was convicted and sentenced to die by an all-white jury who remained unaware of critical elements of his life story. Like so many people who end up on death row, Hall had survived harrowing childhood trauma. Case records included sworn declarations from family and neighbors who described alcoholism, domestic violence, and deprivation; a local pastor remembered one of Hall’s siblings asking if he and his wife would be willing to adopt her. Such evidence can make the difference between life and death in a capital trial. But Hall’s attorneys failed to fully investigate and present this side of their client’s life.

Hall changed during his 25 years on death row. His children described him as a caring and supportive father and grandfather. A longtime pen pal described his love of reading and his expressions of deep remorse. One of his lawyers later wrote that she would have given him a room in her house if she’d ever had the chance.

Matthews, who had known Hall since they were children, saw the change up close. He forged a strong relationship with their son and supported her work as a community organizer. “He believed in me,” she said.

Matthews witnessed the execution. Apart from the horror of watching Hall murdered by lethal injection, she was struck by the forced attempt at normalcy by the Bureau of Prison staff, who made polite small talk as they escorted her to watch him die. Matthews refused to play along. “They said, ‘Is there anything we can do for you?’ And I said, ‘You can let him go.’ ‘Oh, unfortunately we’re not the people who make that decision.’”

Hall’s execution implicated every one of them, she said. “You are playing a part in this. … What is going to happen when you have to stand and answer for the things that you participated in?”

No Time to Waste

On Monday, Biden stood in the White House Rose Garden as he has for the past three years, accompanied by a pair of turkeys named Peach and Blossom. He recited the names of the previous turkeys he’d pardoned — a total of eight overall — and then joked about Peach and Blossom’s favorite songs, which ostensibly include Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.”

“Well fellas, your prayer’s gonna be answered today,” Biden said. He then “pardoned” the birds “based on your temperament and your commitment to being productive members of society.”

In Terre Haute, some of the same men who watched the ceremony on TV in 2020 once again face the prospect of their own execution. They are not asking for a pardon. They are not even asking for forgiveness for their crimes. They are asking to be spared the torture of being strapped to a gurney and killed in front of gawking strangers. They are asking for a chance to spare their loved ones the trauma of their execution. And they are asking for Biden to follow through on what he claimed to believe before he won the presidency.

There is no time to waste. As Matthews told me four years ago, “I think we have to start yelling about it, because to me what’s happening is we’re waiting until these guys get a date. And then the time moves so fast.”