Civil and human rights groups urge Biden to end federal death penalty

A coalition of leading US civil and human rights groups is calling on Joe Biden immediately to commute the sentences of all 49 federal death row inmates and reinstate a moratorium on executions carried out by the US government.

Virginia all but certain to become first southern state to abolish death penalty

Read more

Led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and joined by 82 major organisations including the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International, the coalition has written to the president, urging him to put an end to the federal death penalty.

The plea follows a similar urging from Democrats in Congress and comes after an unprecedented killing spree that marked the bloody end of Donald Trump’s presidency.

The letter writers invoke Biden’s campaign promise to reinvigorate “America’s commitment to justice”. They argue that his ambition to create a nation as good as its ideals will never be achieved unless he puts an end to the “cruel, ineffective and irreversible use of the death penalty” by the federal government.

Until Trump revived the practice, the US government had played a relatively minor role in capital punishment, leaving the bulk of the blood-letting to individual states. But last year, after a 17-year hiatus, federal executions restarted.

Between 14 July and 16 January – four days before Trump left the White House – his administration killed 13 prisoners including Lisa Montgomery, a mentally ill woman whose history of childhood abuse was classified by several experts as torture.

The extraordinarily rushed nature of the executions gave Trump the macabre distinction of having used the federal government to put to death more American civilians in a year than all the states combined for the first time in US history.

As the supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in a dissent in the case of the last prisoner to be killed, Dustin Higgs, “the federal government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than it had in the previous six decades”.

Biden has the chance not only to return to the pre-Trump norm, in which the federal government does not engage in executions, but to make the position formal by commuting the death sentences of the 49 people left on federal death row. The letter writers also urge Biden to use his executive powers, which do not require congressional approval, to make a moratorium official.

‘A lifetime of torture’: the story of the woman Trump is rushing to execute

Read more

They note that this would bring the federal government into line with the winds of change blowing across America, in which the death penalty is steadily declining. About 25 states have either abolished the ultimate punishment or imposed a moratorium, a number that rises to 33 if states that have not executed a single prisoner in a decade are added.

In a significant turn, Virginia is poised to become the first state of the old Confederate south to abolish the death penalty, after both its legislative chambers voted to end the practice. The Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, has indicated he will sign the abolition bill, probably in April.

The joint letter to Biden argues that an end to the death penalty is especially important given his commitment to racial justice. Of the 49 inmates left on federal death row, about 20 – or 41% – are African American, compared with the 13% of the US population that is black.