Biden’s Christmas present, commuted sentences for 40 prisoners waiting to be executed

Forty American inmates on death row in federal prisons could receive the most precious Christmas present. Joe Biden is in fact considering commuting the sentences of most – if not to all – the condemned waiting to be executed. A gesture of reconciliation before leaving the White House forever which the Catholic president had been thinking about for some time but which would have been accelerated after Thursday’s phone call with Pope Francis. According to an exclusive from the Wall Street Journal, the decision should arrive next week but there is still an issue to be resolved, namely whether to make some exceptions for the cruelest crimes such as terrorism or hate crimes. Biden’s Justice Minister, Merrick Garland, would have advised him to exclude from the initiative precisely those who are guilty of these crimes, such as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and Dylann Roof, who massacred nine people at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015 Emanuel in Charleston, South Carolina. Biden declared that he wanted to abolish the federal death penalty since his 2020 election campaign and in fact in these four years there have been no executions at the federal level. Additionally, in July 2021, Garland issued a moratorium on the death penalty to review policies and procedures, particularly those from the Donald Trump era, during which there were a record number of federal executions. In addition to pressure from religious and human rights groups, it seems that the phone call a few days ago with Pope Bergoglio, whom Biden will visit on January 10, in his last trip abroad as president. In the meeting, the two leaders discussed efforts to “advance human rights, protect religious freedoms, and work for world peace,” according to a White House statement. And at the beginning of the month in his weekly speech the pontiff made a prayer for the commutation of sentences for American prisoners sentenced to death. On the other hand, it is no secret that there is a special relationship between Biden and the Pope that dates back more than ten years ago, when the then vice president led the American delegation to Rome for Bergoglio’s inauguration at the Vatican.