In the stunning act of clemency just two days before Christmas, Biden, 82, gave the reprieve to some of the nation’s most violent murderers — nine of them found too dangerous to live after butchering fellow inmates — as part of his effort at “ensuring a fair and effective justice system,” the White House said.
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“But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”
Biden, who opposes the death penalty, lowered each of the 37 sentences to life in prison without parole. He did not say why specifically he considered the original penalties unjust.
The three men on federal death row did not get a commutation were Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who along with his brother killed three people in 2013; Robert Bowers, who killed 11 at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, and Dylann Roof, who killed nine black Charleston churchgoers in 2015.
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Christmas also came early for Anthony Battle, who murdered an Atlanta prison guard with a hammer in 1994 while serving a life sentence for raping and murdering his wife, a US Marine, in 1987 at Camp Lejeune, NC.
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Four years later, he strangled naval officer Amanda Snell, 20, inside her barrack in Arlington, Va.
Iouri Mikhel, meanwhile, was convicted of murdering five Russian and Georgian immigrants after kidnapping them for ransom, which in some cases was paid before he killed them anyway.
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Biden has flexed his presidential clemency powers in the past month.
The retiring president on Dec. 1 issued a blanket pardon for his own son Hunter Biden, 54 — wiping the slate of his June conviction of three federal gun felonies and his September guilty plea to $1.4 million in tax fraud from foreign business dealings in which he repeatedly involved his father.
Biden also commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 people on Dec. 12 who had been temporarily released from prison during the COVID-19 pandemic — including Josephine Gray, the “Black Widow” who killed two of her ex-husbands and a third lover, and Rita Crundwell, who as comptroller of Dixon, Ill., stole nearly $54 million from the 15,000-person town over two decades.
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Instead, just before the 2022 midterm elections, he announced a mass pardon for people convicted of simple pot possession — of whom none were in prison, drawing outrage from prisoners who called it a “slap in the face.”
* Original Article:
https://nypost.com/2024/12/23/us-news/biden-commutes-death-sentences-of-child-killers-and-mass-murderers-2-days-before-christmas/?utm_source=smartnews&utm_campaign=nypost&utm_medium=referral