Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy said Monday that President Joe Biden has usurped Congress’ power by commuting nearly every inmate on federal death row.
Biden’s move impacts the sentences of 37 of 40 federal death row prisoners, with the exception of the Boston Marathon bomber and two other inmates. McCarthy said on “America’s Newsroom” that the president interfered with Congress’ role of issuing a punishment for federal cases, making his act an “abuse of the pardon power.”
“I think it’s yet another abuse of the pardon power,” McCarthy said. “I think it’s interesting, Julie [Banderas], that he didn’t give commutations on the death penalty to the three death penalty or death row inmates that were dealt with by the Biden Justice Department and the Obama-Biden Justice Department. So with respect to those family members and the grief and pain they’re going through, he couldn’t look them in the eye and say ‘oh, progressive principles don’t allow us to go forward with the death penalty here.’ But he wiped the slate clean on everyone else and he did it in a way that is a categorical change of the law. That’s for Congress to make, it’s an abuse of the pardon power to use it that way.”
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McCarthy wrote in a column for the National Review that it is Congress’ role to end the death penalty by enacting a law, and accused Biden of abusing his pardon power due to the legislative branch’s failure to outlaw the practice.
“If, as progressives claim, the nation has evolved beyond the death penalty, there would be an easy way to make that manifest: Congress could enact a law prohibiting the death penalty,” McCarthy wrote. “But it hasn’t because, far from a consensus against capital punishment, the public broadly approves of it. Unable to get the constitutional or legislative change that aligns with his stated policy preference — a preference in the execution of which Biden, as he has been wont to do for a half-century, insults our intelligence — the president has abused the pardon power. He has usurped Congress’s power to make the laws, which includes the authority to prescribe punishment for federal criminal offenses.”
The former federal prosecutor accused Biden of “selective moral preening” for commuting the capital punishment sentences that were established in previous administrations.
The president commuted the sentence of Thomas Steven Sanders, who had been convicted for the kidnapping and murder of a 12-year-old in Louisiana, and Richard Allen Jackson, who was found guilty for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a 22-year-old jogger in North Carolina, according to USA Today.
Biden did not commute the sentences of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013 or Robert Bowers, who was on death row for the Tree of Life synagogue mass shooting in 2018 that left 11 people dead, USA Today reported. The president further declined to commute the sentencing of Dylann Roof, who was convicted of opening fire inside an African American church in 2015.
The president’s act is an expansion on his record of “criminal justice reform” as he has issued more commutations than any of his recent predecessors, the White House said in a statement.
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