Biden ignores military death row in commutation spree

Though President Joe Biden commuted all but three sentences for those on federal death row, he ignored the four men on military death row.

On Monday morning, the White House announced that Biden had commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row to life imprisonment. The move comes as incoming President Donald Trump has vowed to resume federal executions.

“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden said in a statement. “But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

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Biden said the exceptions he made were in cases of “terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.” The three people to remain on death row are Dylann Roof, the man who killed nine at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; Robert Bowers, the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber.

As commander-in-chief, the president also has commutation power over those on military death row. Those four people are: Ronald Gray, who raped and murdered two women, and attempted to rape and murder a third; Hasan Akbar who killed two and injured 16 soldiers in an attack on Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait during the Iraq invasion; Timothy Hennis, who was originally acquitted in state court for the murder of three in North Carolina, but was tried again in military court for the crime and convicted; and Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 at Fort Hood in Texas in an attempt to help Islamic insurgents, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

If Biden chose to apply his criteria to the military death row, it’s likely that only Hasan would remain. Akbar, though he attempted to kill a large number of people, was not driven by hate, according to the BBC. Instead, Akbar said he suffered from mental illness, and his father said Akbar had faced harassment due to his race and religion.

Though Biden has so far declined to commute these sentences, none of these four men is necessarily in imminent danger of being executed. The U.S. military has not executed a prisoner since 1961.