WASHINGTON — President Biden is considering commuting the death sentences of most — if not all — of the 40 men currently on federal death row for murder, according to a new report.
In addition to a handful of well-known notorious killers, five of the men murdered children, nine butchered fellow inmates and one killed a prison guard with a hammer while serving a life sentence for raping and murdering his wife, a US Marine.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has recommended that Biden, who opposes capital punishment, commute the sentences to life imprisonment for all but a handful of the 40 cases, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The Journal did not report which prisoners Garland urged Biden not to spare, but they may include Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 people in 2018 at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and Dylann Roof, who massacred nine black parishioners in a racist 2015 attack on the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC.
Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who with his late brother killed three and wounded hundreds in 2013, also is on federal death row.
Advisories from the attorney general often serve as cover for presidents to take controversial actions and the White House told the Journal that a final decision has not been made.
It’s unclear how the clemency would impact pending cases, including federal prosecutors’ request for a death sentence in the looming trial of Payton Gendron, who murdered 10 people in a 2022 mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY, allegedly motivated by anti-black racism.
The federal death row roster includes Kaboni Savage, who was convicted of committing or ordering the deaths of 12 people including four children as a Philadelphia drug dealer, and Thomas Sanders, who in 2010 kidnapped and then shot 12-year-Lexis Roberts four times and cut her throat — after also murdering her mother.
Others include Iouri Mikhel, who was convicted of murdering five Russian and Georgian immigrants after kidnapping them for ransom, and Jorge Avila-Torrez, who murdered two girls in 2005 and then a naval officer four years later.
Biden has doled out a large number of controversial pardons and commutations this month — beginning with a blanket pardon for his own son Hunter Biden, 54, on Dec. 1. The first son was convicted in June of three federal gun felonies and pleaded guilty in September to $1.4 million in tax fraud from foreign business dealings in which he repeatedly involved his father.
Biden commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 people on Dec. 12 who had been temporarily released from prison during the COVID-19 pandemic.
That mass reprieve drew backlash when that lineup was found to include Josephine Gray, the so-called “Black Widow” who slayed two of her ex-husbands and another lover, and Rita Crundwell, the former comptroller of Dixon, Ill., who was convicted of stealing nearly $54 million from the 15,000-person town over two decades.
The Post has reached out to the White House for comment.
