Biden Commutes Sentences of Most Federal Prisoners on Death Row
On December 23, 2024, outgoing Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D) commuted the sentences of all but three federal prisoners facing execution. The 37 prisoners receiving commutations will now serve life in custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) without possibility of parole, which was abolished decades ago for all federal crimes committed after November 1, 1987.
Biden called the commutations “consistent with the moratorium my Administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.” Left to face execution were Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 31, who set off pressure-cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013, killing three and injuring another 264; Dylann Roof, 30, a white supremacist who gunned down nine Black worshipers in 2015 at a South Carolina church; and Robert Bowers, 52, who fatally shot 11 worshippers and wounded another six in an antisemitic attack at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018.
It was the first exercise of a president’s power to take a federal prisoner off death row since 2017, when outgoing Pres. Barrack Obama (D) commuted the sentence of former U.S. Army Pvt. Dwight Jeffrey Loving, who had been condemned for robbing and killing two fellow soldiers moonlighting as taxi drivers.
Biden’s journey to granting the commutations was remarkable, given his vocal support for the death penalty earlier in his career. After co-authoring 1994’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which expanded the range of crimes eligible for a death sentence, he bragged that “I am the guy who put these death penalties in this bill.” Notably, nearly every one of the prisoners he spared was on death row because of the bill that Biden wrote.
The move also preceded the return to the White House of Pres.-elect Donald J. Trump (R), who raced to carry out 13 executions of federal prisoners in the last months before his first term ended in January 2021; the dubious circumstances of those killings included paying private executioners in cash, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Mar. 2021, p.1.] During his upcoming term, Trump has promised to end Biden’s execution moratorium and expand the list of crimes eligible for the death penalty.
Almost one-third of those granted commutations were already imprisoned when they committed the crimes for which they were condemned. They included Anthony George Battle, 61, a prisoner sentenced in 1997 for killing a guard at a Georgia prison; Shannon Wayne Agofsky, 50, convicted in 2004 of killing a fellow prisoner at lockup in Texas; Carlos David Caro, 53, sentenced in 2007 for killing a fellow prisoner at another lockup in Virginia; Edgar Baltazar Garcia, 44, and Mark Isaac Snarr, 48, sentenced in 2010 for fatally stabbing a fellow prisoner, also in Texas; Wesley Paul Coonce Jr., 44, and Charles Michael Hall, 53, sentenced in 2014 for killing a fellow prisoner in Missouri; Christopher Emory Cramer, 42, and Ricky Allen Fackrell, 40, sentenced in 2018 for killing another Texas prisoner; Joseph Ebron, 45, sentenced in 2019 for killing still another prisoner in Texas; as well as Brandon Leon Basham, 44, and Chadrick Evan Fulks, 48, both sentenced in 2004 for kidnapping and murdering two women during a 17-day crime spree after the men escaped from a Kentucky prison.
Sources: The Independent, Washington Post
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