CLEAR Co-Signs Coalition Letter Calling on President Biden to Commute All Federal Death Sentences

12.12.2024 —Northeastern Law’s Center for Law, Equity and Race (CLEAR) has signed a letter urging President Joe Biden to commute the death sentences of 40 federal death row inmates before President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House.

“The continuing disparate application of the death penalty against Black people is a concern for CLEAR,” said Dr. Deborah A. Jackson, managing director of CLEAR. “The death penalty has a long and sordid history in this country and can be traced back to lynchings of innocent Black men and women. We thought it important to lend our voice and call on President Biden to use his power to commute the death sentences for the 40 prisoners currently on death row before he leaves office.”

The letter is co-signed by 134 organizations and organized by the ACLU, Amnesty International USA, Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. It is one of dozens of letters released on December 9 from a diverse coalition, including faith leaders, families of homicide victims, current and former prosecutors, business leaders, exonerees and former corrections officials.

“The federal death penalty is not immune from the hallmark irreparable failures of the death penalty at the state level,” reads the letter. “Indeed, the nation bore witness to thirteen executions in the final seven months of the first Trump administration, all of which were marred with devastating issues endemic to capital punishment like racial bias, ineffective legal assistance, unreliable forensic evidence, and defendants executed who had substantial intellectual disabilities and severe mental health conditions.”

Advocates fear a resurgence of federal executions under an incoming Trump administration. This letter calls on Biden to use his presidential clemency powers before he leaves office and to fulfill his campaign promise to “bring America into a new era of moral leadership.”

The letter addresses the history of the death penalty in the United States and its ties to “slavery, lynchings, and white vigilantism.” It highlights the disproportionate impact the death penalty system has on communities of color, and argues that it does little to advance public safety.

President Biden was the first presidential candidate to openly oppose the death penalty, and his administration has issued a moratorium on federal executions.

The full letter can be read here.