Kaboni Savage’s death sentence was commuted by President Joe Biden

The sentence for notorious North Philadelphia drug kingpin Kaboni Savage, who was on federal death row for 12 murders – including a 2004 arson attack that killed a witness and killed four children and two adults – was announced Monday in life imprisonment commuted. Savage is one of 37 federal death row inmates to whom President Joe Biden granted similar relief in one of his final acts as president.

Because of Biden’s decision, Savage, who was convicted of the 2013 killings and was largely unrepentant, will be spared possible execution and will instead serve a life sentence without the possibility of parole. A former boxer who became a major drug dealer in the world of drug trafficking, Savage became known as one of the city’s most ruthless crime bosses, using wanton violence as a blunt tool to build his empire.

In 2004, while in solitary confinement awaiting trial in a federal case, Savage ordered the arson attack on a North Philadelphia home that killed family members of Eugene Coleman, a former employee who had agreed to help the FBI in the investigation to help with proceedings against him.

The arson attack killed two adults and four children, including Coleman’s 15-month-old son.

As part of their case, prosecutors played secretly recorded prison recordings of Savage, including recordings of him joking about the murders and saying that Coleman should pour barbecue sauce over his relatives who were burned in the fire.

In 2020, a federal appeals court upheld Savage’s death sentence.

Along with Savage, Biden commuted sentences for people from other states convicted of killing police and military officers, people involved in deadly bank robberies or drug deals, and people convicted of killing guards or prisoners in Federal institutions were condemned. Savage was the only Philadelphian on federal death row.

The Biden administration announced a moratorium on the federal death penalty in 2021 to investigate the protocols used, pausing executions during Biden’s term. But Biden had actually promised in the past to take the issue further by promising to end federal executions without the reservations for terrorism and hate-motivated mass killings.

While running for president in 2020, Biden said on his campaign website that he would “work to pass legislation abolishing the death penalty at the federal level and create incentives for states to follow the federal government’s lead.”

The ACLU welcomed Biden’s decision on Monday, calling it an essential first step toward abolishing the death penalty, which the organization sees as “inhumane.”

“President Biden affirmed the power of redemption over retribution and reminded us that state-sanctioned killings do not make us safer,” the ACLU said in a statement. “The ACLU has long opposed the death penalty and highlighted its fundamental flaws: it is error-prone, racially biased and a drain on public resources.”

After Biden’s sweeping move, only three federal inmates remain facing execution: Dylann Roof, who carried out the racist murders of nine black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 2013 Boston Marathon bomber; and Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.

There were 13 federal executions during Trump’s first term, more than any other president in modern history.

Those were the first federal executions since 2003. The last three took place after Election Day in November 2020 but before Trump left office the following January, the first time federal prisoners were executed by a lame-duck president since Grover Cleveland in 1889.

Biden recently faced pressure from advocacy groups urging him to take action to make it harder for Trump to increase the use of the death penalty for federal inmates.

The president’s announcement also comes less than two weeks after he announced the sentences of about 1,500 people released from prison and placed in home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic and 39 others convicted of nonviolent crimes were transformed into what represents the greatest single-day act of grace in modern history.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.