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Catholics praise President Biden’s mercy toward death penalty prisoners

Catholics praise President Biden’s mercy toward death penalty prisoners

Catholic opponents of the death penalty praised President Joe Biden’s decision to commute the sentences of all but three of the 40 inmates on federal death row. This decision will prevent President-elect Donald Trump from resuming stalled executions, according to the White House.

“President Biden’s historic decision today promotes human dignity and underscores the sacred value of every human life,” said Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, executive director of the Catholic Mobilizing Network.

Since the election, Catholic voices, led by Pope Francis, have called on America’s second Catholic president to make the commutations. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, revised by Pope Francis in 2018, calls the death penalty “inadmissible” and “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the human person.”

The Catholic Mobilizing Network and other faith groups have called on the president to pardon the 40 inmates on federal death row. The Catholic bishops of the USA also joined this appeal a few weeks ago, as did Francis. In a Dec. 3 National Catholic Reporter editorial, he appealed to Biden’s faith in calling for this action, which was taken on Dec. 23.

Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called the president’s action a “significant step toward promoting human dignity and respect for human life from the womb to the grave in our country.”

“My fellow bishops and I join in expressing our gratitude for President Biden’s commuted federal death sentences for 37 men,” he said. “We encourage all lawmakers to continue working toward the total abolition of the death penalty and to redirect the energy and resources currently directed toward executions to provide compassionate and professional assistance to the families of victims.”

Francis had urged sparing the lives of death row inmates in the United States in his weekly address on December 8 at the Vatican. “Let us pray that their judgment will be transformed and changed,” the pope said. “Let us remember our brothers and sisters and ask the Lord to save them from death.”

Biden spoke with Francis on December 19, shortly before the White House announced that the two men would meet at the Vatican in January, before Biden leaves office.

Sr. Helen Prejean, a longtime opponent of the death penalty, has urged her followers on social media to write and call the White House and urge the president to commute the death sentences. On Monday, the Sister of St. Joseph said on X: “This is a milestone in the fight to abolish the death penalty – thank you!”

Vaillancourt Murphy said in an interview with NCR that the “national and international attention of this historic decision” highlights the failures of the death penalty but is also an “extraordinary gift and relief that feels like a Christmas miracle.”

“Our work to abolish the death penalty will continue, but these federal changes allow us to focus our efforts on states seeking to abolish the death penalty or fighting against executions,” Vaillancourt Murphy said. “This is a watershed moment for the death penalty in the United States.”

Vaillancourt Murphy said the importance of the president’s Catholic faith was a key factor. “It is not lost on any of us that an important aspect of his motivation to commute these sentences is based on his appreciation of the dignity of human life,” she said.

Biden left in place the death sentences of three inmates convicted of terrorism or hate-motivated mass killings: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers, in which three people died and more than 250 were injured; Robert Bowers, the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue attacker in Pittsburgh that killed 11 people; and Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

“I cannot in good conscience resign and allow a new administration to resume the executions I stopped,” Biden said in a statement.

Biden pointed to his experiences as a public defender early in his career and his four decades in federal office. “I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” he said.

He said commuting the death sentences of the 37 men, who will now serve life sentences without parole, was “consistent with the moratorium my administration has placed on federal executions in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”

“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, mourn the victims of their heinous acts, and mourn all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable losses,” the president said.

During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden promised to abolish the federal death penalty, but a measure failed in Congress. In 2021, the Justice Department issued a moratorium on federal executions while the federal death penalty was under review.

During Trump’s previous term, 13 federal death row inmates were executed after a nearly 20-year pause in federal executions.

The Catholic Mobilizing Network called for legislation to abolish the death penalty. “We will continue to fervently pray that President Biden’s bold move will spur legislative action that ultimately leads to the abolition of the death penalty at all levels of government in the United States,” the group said in a statement.

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