President Donald Trump speaking to reporters at Palm Beach International Airport in Florida on Friday, October 31, 2025 (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian/Flickr)
Although U.S. President Donald Trump is drawing strong criticism for some of the pardons he has issued since returning to the White House 11 months ago — from the January 6, 2021 rioters to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández — he is openly disdainful of pardons and commutations issued by former U.S. President Joe Biden. And Trump's strong support of the death penalty plays a major role in that disdain.
In an article published by Salon on December 30, Austin Sarat — a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College in Massachusetts — warns that Trump is willing to violate constitutional norms in his efforts to advance the death penalty and "undermine" Biden's pardons.
"On December 22," Sarat explains, "the New York Times published a shocking story detailing the ways the Trump Administration is working with allies in red states to pursue new death sentences against people whose sentences were commuted by former President Joe Biden. While this is yet another example of the president's unrelenting vendetta against his predecessor, it also creates, as the Times observes, a 'legal predicament' for people subject to a second prosecution for the same crime that has 'no modern precedent.'"
The Trump Administration, Sarat argues, is "engaged in a bloodthirsty embrace of capital punishment" — and Trump "directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to do whatever she could to undermine the clemency that Biden had extended to 37 people awaiting execution on federal death row."
"Under the Constitution's prohibition of double jeopardy," the Amherst College scholar observes, "the feds cannot prosecute them again, but Trump ordered Bondi to examine each of their cases to determine 'whether these offenders can be charged with state capital crimes' and to 'recommend appropriate action to state and local authorities'…. Over the past year, prosecutors in Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina have charged four of the 37 with crimes for which they have already been convicted."
Sarat continues, "Those prosecutions should not go forward. And if state officials won’t stop them, judges should.…. What Trump and his allies are doing is a way of undermining the president's power to grant pardons and reprieves — and more specifically, Biden's exercise of that power. If outrageous claims about autopens won't do the job, perhaps prosecutors in red states can help."
Austin Sarat's full article for Salon is available at this link.
