Merely Negotiating the Price

The Biden Commutations

There is an old joke about a man asking a woman if she would sleep with him for a million dollars.

The woman says “For a million dollars? Sure.”

The man then offers her one dollar, and she becomes angry, saying what kind of person does he think she is?

“I know what kind – now we’re just haggling over the price.”

Replace money with political considerations and we have a pretty good analogy for Joe Biden’s decision to commute most but not all federal death penalty sentences.

As is his wont with about everything, Biden has been extremely wriggly on the issue of the death penalty. He has said as a “staunch Catholic” he opposes it but he “wrote” legislation that expanded its use under federal law. And in his 2020 campaign, he promised to end the federal death penalty for everyone forever.

That, of course, did not happen, hence the 37 commutations he issued today.

But why not all 40?

The sentences he commuted to life without the possibility of parole involved mass murderers, serial killers, child killers and the list goes on.

Left off the list were Robert Bowers, the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue shooter which left 11 people dead; Dylann Roof, a White supremacist who killed nine Black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who worked with his now-dead brother to perpetuate the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured hundreds.

Biden is claiming now he opposes the death penalty for everyone except for "terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder,” hence the decision.

More accurately and far more honestly, Biden left Bowers, Roof, and Tsarnaev off of the list for purely political reasons.

Those three cases the public at large were keenly aware of – the horrible crimes were public, generated massive media coverage, and were ideologically motivated.

What Biden did not want to deal with was the fury that accompanied his other recent commutations, which saw evil judges and corrupt politicians go free. Even the national media (probably?) would have been in an uproar if he let that troika live indefinitely.

Commuting Bowers, Roof, and Tsarnaev would have enraged too many people, too many politically connected people actually. It can be argued the scope of the crimes were different, but at least one of the murderers who received a commutation did order the killing of a dozen people – it just wasn’t all at once and only made the local news when he burnt down a house full of people.

For the rest of the victim’s families, tough. You’re just regular humans – feel free to complain to your local TV station but that’s not a big problem for Joe.

The death penalty is a tricky issue in general, with reasonable arguments being plausibly made on both sides. Personally, I am in favor of it and believe no commutations should have been issued, but if I were opposed to the death penalty on principal, the moral and ethical thing to do would have been to commute all of the sentences, not just the ones that didn’t happen to make international news.

Especially if I was commuting the sentences to make sure Donald Trump could not fulfill his campaign promise and actually carry them out.

That is just unconscionable.

So Joe – like the woman – was merely negotiating the price…of life and death.