Biden set the wrong precedent for the ‘right’ kind of victims with commutations | Opinion
President Joe Biden did the right thing by nearly emptying federal death row, though he should have gone further. Gov. Roy Cooper should follow suit and empty North Carolina’s death row. And the holiday pause South Carolina put on its recent death penalty spree should be made permanent. That’s true even though the family of some victims want the state to murder the men who murdered their loved ones.
Biden commuted the sentences of 37 men on death row, effectively preventing President-elect Donald Trump from cranking up the federal government’s murder machine the way he did during his first term in office. That move came shortly after the president commuted the sentence of 1,500 people and pardoned 39 people who were convicted for non-violent crimes, and on the heels of his ill-advised pardon of Hunter Biden.
I don’t know if Biden went on a commutation spree because of the backlash from his decision to pardon Hunter Biden, or because he had long planned to issue the commutations. No matter. It was the morally justified thing to do, though not everyone sees it that way.
A man named Brandon Council was found guilty in 2017 of murdering 59-year-old Donna Major and 36-year-old Katie Skeen. He murdered them at then-CresCom bank in Conway, South Carolina where they worked. Council was sentenced to federal death row for robbery and double murder.
Daniel Major, Donna Major’s husband, told The Sun News the commutations made him disappointed in the justice system and said the president abused his power.
Derek A. Shoemake, one of prosecutors who helped convict Council, also disagreed with Biden.
“They chose which ones would be commuted and which ones would not,” Shoemake said. “That’s hard for the victims’ families to swallow.”
It’s a compelling argument. Biden picked and chose rather than going all the way.
He didn’t empty federal death row the way he should have. Three men remain: Robert Bowers, who murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pennsylvania; Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Dylann Roof, who committed the 2015 massacre at Mother Emanuel in Charleston, South Carolina.
Though the president says he doesn’t believe in the death penalty, he nevertheless believes it’s okay for the government to murder people who commit acts of terror or hate-motivated mass murder. In effect, Biden has set precedent. If you are murdered in a Conway bank, or raped, murdered and duct-taped to a tree, which is what a man named Richard Allen Jackson did to a North Carolina woman named Karen Styles, the perpetrator doesn’t deserve death because you aren’t the “right” kind of victim.
That’s another reason we shouldn’t authorize the state to play God and decide who should live and who should die, in addition to its long history of racial injustice.
It’s why South Carolina, led by Republicans who self-identify as “pro-lifers,” should urge Gov. Heny McMaster to extend the holiday pause in the state’s recent ungodly execution push and to abandon the barbaric practice altogether.
And it’s why Cooper should listen to the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty and the ACLU and empty the state’s death row, the fifth-largest in the nation.
Commuting sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole is not letting murderers get away with crimes. It is assuring that the state doesn’t become a murderer itself in its pursuit of justice. Life in prison is a significant sentence, no matter the crime.
I get why some victims want what they’ve been told is the system’s ultimate punishment in an attempt to bring themselves a sense of justice. It’s just not true. It’s a relic of a barbaric era we are supposed to be leaving behind.
I’ve lost loved ones to violent crime. And a friend of mine lost a sister to one of Dylann Roof’s bullets during his racist attack in a Black church. I know how much that still hurts her. But Biden was wrong for leaving Roof on death row. He should have commuted his sentence, too.