The Daily Fuckup

President Joe Biden used the final stretch of his term on Dec. 23, 2024, to wipe out nearly all of the federal death row. He commuted 37 of the 40 federal death sentences to life in prison without parole, leaving only three cases untouched. In his statement, Biden said he could not stand by and allow an incoming administration to resume executions he had halted.

The move does not abolish capital punishment in federal law. It ends the existing sentences for those 37 prisoners and blocks an immediate restart of executions in those cases, but it leaves future federal death-penalty decisions to the next administration and the Justice Department it controls.

That distinction matters. Biden’s action was a sweeping clemency decision, not a repeal. It erased the death sentences for people already on federal death row, including inmates convicted in some of the government’s most notorious cases, and converted those punishments to life without parole. It also put the outgoing administration on record as unwilling to hand over active death-row cases that could be put back on a lethal timetable.

The backdrop is Donald Trump’s record on the federal death penalty. During Trump’s first term, the federal government carried out 13 executions after a long gap in federal use of capital punishment. That run made Trump the president associated with the most federal executions in modern times, and his return to office raised the possibility that the government could once again move quickly on capital cases.

Biden’s commutations foreclosed that possibility for the inmates covered by Monday’s order. They did not stop a future administration from seeking death in new federal cases, and they did not erase capital punishment from the statute books. But they did ensure that Trump would not inherit a live federal death row ready for an immediate restart of executions when he returns to power.

The political message was plain even if the legal effect was narrower. Biden framed the decision as a matter of conscience and basic restraint; critics are likely to read it as a last-minute move to deny Trump a stage-set for punishment politics. Either way, the order landed as one of Biden’s most consequential clemency acts, and one of the clearest examples yet of him using the pardon power to shut down what he saw as a dangerous handoff.