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Lame duck: an elected official continuing to hold political office during the period between the election and the inauguration of a successor
One-upmanship: a situation in which someone does something in order to prove they are better than someone else
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In the early 1990s, Democratic Senator Joe Biden called Republican President George H. W. Bush “soft on crime” because the death penalty was rarely carried out at the federal level during Bush’s administration.
Biden joked that the crime bill he envisioned did “everything but hang people for jaywalking.”
The 1994 crime bill, drafted by Biden and signed by Democratic President Clinton, expanded the federal death penalty to make 60 crimes eligible for capital punishment, including espionage, treason, and large-scale drug trafficking. Most capital punishment supporters believe that the death penalty should only be used for first-degree murder, making Biden’s death penalty proposal for offenses other than premeditated murder excessive even for staunch proponents of capital punishment.
In the mid-1990s, 80 percent of Americans supported capital punishment for murderers, but when Biden campaigned for president in 2020, only 55 percent of Americans supported the death penalty—a historic low. Because Biden is a politician whose convictions coincide with public opinion, he made a campaign promise to introduce legislation to abolish the death penalty at the federal level and encourage states to follow suit.
Biden eventually defeated Republican incumbent Donald Trump and became the 46th president of the United States. Between Biden’s election and his inauguration, the Trump administration executed five people. Overall, the Trump administration executed 13 death row inmates. The BBC described Trump as “the most prolific execution president” in over a century.
However, the five people executed during Trump’s lame duck months sparked outrage since Trump disregarded a 130-year precedent of halting executions during the presidential transition period.
Anti-death penalty groups said these rushed executions had nothing to do with justice. Trump was politically motivated to carry out the executions before President-elect Biden abolished the federal death penalty, making Trump’s lame duck decision to execute reckless and cruel.
Following Trump’s final lame duck execution, the director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project stated, “President-elect Joe Biden promised to abolish the federal death penalty. He must keep that commitment.”
Politico stated that on Biden’s first day as president, he signed over a dozen executive orders to erase Trump’s legacy and advance his own agenda. Unfortunately, poor performance, unfavorable outcomes, and broken promises characterized the remainder of Biden’s presidency.
The Associated Press reported in 2023 that President Biden had failed to keep his promise to abolish the federal death penalty. Biden’s Justice Department declared a moratorium on federal executions in 2021, but opponents of capital punishment expected more than a temporary halt that could be easily reversed by a pro-death penalty president. The more optimistic anti-death penalty advocates thought that Biden would abolish the federal death penalty during his second term. Their hopes were shattered when Biden dropped out of the race for president, leaving his vice president, Kamala Harris, as the automatic Democratic nominee to face Trump for the presidency.
Trump defeated Harris, becoming the first Republican to win the popular vote in twenty years.
Biden transitioned from the elder statesman elected to erase Trump’s legacy to the reelection dropout who was responsible for Trump’s return to the White House. It turned out that American voters preferred Trump’s government to Biden’s, and the only legacy that will be erased is Biden’s unless Biden redeemed himself during his lame duck period.
The Associated Press reported shortly before Christmas that President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, converting their sentences to life imprisonment just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump, an outspoken supporter of expanding capital punishment, took office. The decision spared the lives of those convicted of the murder of police and military officers, those involved in deadly bank robberies, and the killing of guards or prisoners in federal facilities.
Rep. Ayanna Pressly, D-Mass., who believes the death penalty is “racist, flawed, and fundamentally unjust and has no place in our society,” complimented Biden. Her words were: “The President’s decision to commute the death sentences of 37 individuals on federal death row is a historic and groundbreaking act of compassion that will save lives, address the deep racial disparities in our criminal legal system, and send a powerful message about redemption, decency, and humanity.”
Biden’s commuted death sentences were not about redemption. They were about remembrance. Biden knows that history will not be kind to his presidency, and he wants the record to show that he was more merciful than Trump.
Biden believes he one-upped Trump concerning capital punishment, but he actually didn’t.
Bill Barr, Trump’s attorney general, released his book One Damn Thing After Another in 2022. The book explained that the Justice Department had a responsibility to uphold the existing law by carrying out the death sentences and that the decision to accelerate the executions during the presidential transition period was Barr’s, not Trump’s.
When history looks back on Biden’s lame duck tenure, it will not recall that he was more merciful than the prior attorney general. It will recall that Heather Turner’s mother was murdered during a bank robbery by one of the death row inmates Biden spared, and Turner called the commutation of the killer’s sentence a “gross abuse of power” and lamented that “at no point did the president consider the victims.”
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