President-elect Trump posted a statement on Truth Social today about President Biden’s decision to commute the sentences of most, but not all, federal death penalty prisoners.
I don’t always agree with President Trump but in this case he took the words right out of my mouth. This decision makes zero sense. If Biden was so against the death penalty as a matter of conscience, then he should have commuted all 40 death sentences. Instead, he carved out an explanation whereby Dylan Roof, the church shooter, Robert Bowers, the Tree of Live synagogue shooter, and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are still facing the death penalty.
I’m perfectly fine with that as they all deserve it. Bowers and Roof both killed innocent people at houses of worship. Tsarnaev helped kill 3 people including an 8-year-old boy and severely injured more than a dozen other people. But do those three murderers deserve death more than the child murderers Biden just excused? I don’t think so.
In fact, I think it’s obvious that Biden commuted the sentences of horrible crimes that were less well known while preserving sentences for killers that all made national news. Why? Because people remember the Boston bombing and the Tree of Live Shooting. They wouldn’t like to see those murderers escape justice. But most people have never heard of Marvin Gabrion. Only the relatives of the victims of his crimes remember.
“We thought the timing was despicable,” Tim Timmerman, whose 19-year-old daughter, Rachel, was killed in 1997, told NBC affiliate WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
His daughter’s convicted killer, Marvin Gabrion, is also accused of murdering Rachel Timmerman’s infant daughter, whose body was never found, and is the prime suspect in three other deaths. Gabrion is now 71.
“Where’s the justice in just giving him a prison bed to die comfortably in?” Timmerman said, adding, “It wasn’t me that gave Gabrion the death penalty. It was the jury, and I always think it’s important to point that out — that the jury are the people who sentenced Gabrion to the death penalty.”
This guy murdered an infant and Joe Biden decided he deserved a reprieve. What Biden has done here is disgusting and other victim’s relatives are saying so.
The daughter of Donna Major, one of two South Carolina bank employees killed by federal death row inmate Brandon Council in 2017, slammed Council’s commutation as being unfair and an “abuse of power.”
“My mom’s murder is being used as a political game piece by a president who isn’t even fit for office,” Heather Turner posted Tuesday on Facebook. “I stand by my stance that Joe Biden has blood on his hands.”
Again, Biden didn’t commute Dylan Roof’s sentence because he couldn’t justify it in public. But the truth is he can’t justify any of these commutations. None of these killers deserved mercy from the state. They were convicted and sentenced and have had endless appeals. But Biden decided to listen to a bunch of criminal justice activists led by the ACLU and Amnesty International. Their argument, in part, is that there are too many black murderers on death row.
Forty people are currently on federal death row. Over half of those individuals are non-white, including 38% who are Black, despite Black adults representing 11.7% of the population…
Since 1989, 60% of all people federally sentenced to death have been people of color.19 In short, so long as the United States maintains the death penalty, this country will never achieve true racial equity.
Again, these violent criminals were convicted as individuals by different juries who heard and considered the details of each case. If we are going to have the death penalty for anyone, and Biden agrees we should, it’s hard to see how any of the sentences he just commuted were unworthy of that penalty.
Trump is right. It makes no sense that some multiple murderers will die of old age in prison while others will be executed based primarily on their race and secondarily on the PR implications for President Biden.
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