President-elect Trump on Monday pledged to seek the death penalty for certain federal criminal defendants, days after President Biden controversially commuted the death sentences of 37 inmates.
Biden's decision to reclassify death sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole was harshly criticized by Republicans.
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President-elect Donald Trump points out at AmericaFest, Sunday, Dec. 22, 2024, in Phoenix. On Monday, Trump promised that the Justice Department would carry out the death penalty following President Biden's decision to commute the death sentences for 37 inmates. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri)
“As soon as I take office, I will order the Department of Justice to aggressively enforce the death penalty to protect American families and children from rapists, murderers, and violent monsters,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. We will once again be a Nation of Law and Order!”
In its message announcing the move, the White House said Biden's actions would prevent the incoming Trump administration from “carrying out execution sentences that would not be issued under current policy and practice.”
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Only three men on federal death row did not meet Biden's requirements to have their sentences commuted.
They are: Robert Bowers, the Tree of Life synagogue shooter who killed 11 people in 2018; Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who killed nine black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who worked with his now-dead brother to carry out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured hundreds.
Trump spokesman Steven Chueng said Monday that Biden's action was “a slap in the face to the victims, their families and their loved ones.”
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During Trump's first term, 13 federal prisoners were executed, the most under any president in a century. Upon taking office in 2021, Biden declared a moratorium on federal executions.
