Biden brings DEI to death row

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

President Joe Biden made a mockery of the nation's justice system during his four years in office by turning it into an enabling system for wrongdoers and a weapon to target his political opponents. In the waning days of his administration, he has used it to insult victims of the most heinous crimes.

In an unprecedented action this month, the president announced the commutation of the sentences of 37 of the 40 federal inmates on death row. No president has ever summarily granted clemency to so many convicted murderers.

Biden's decision to commute the punishment of these killers was as significant for the three murderers whose lives he did not spare as for the 37 he did. His selective clemency masquerading as an opposition to the death penalty amounts to a diversity, equity, and inclusion approach to justice.

Here is how Biden announced the commutations:

"Today, I am commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life sentences without the possibility of parole," he said. "These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder."

We will revisit the irony of Biden's claim that his administration only approves of the death penalty in cases of "hate-motivated" murder later, but the message of the commutations to the victims of these horrific crimes was simple: Murder by someone motivated by a political or religious ideology makes a life matter more. A victim murdered not for political or ideological reasons by a psychopath with no regard for the dignity of humans matters less.

The three condemned men

So, who are these three people who committed acts of "terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder" and did not deserve clemency? You will probably recognize them, for their crimes dominated national headlines at the time they were committed, and their trials were widely publicized events.

The first is terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who, with his brother, planned and carried out the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 that killed three people. Two more people, police officers, were killed in the ensuing manhunt for the two brothers. Tsarnaev was sentenced to death by a federal jury for his role in the bombing. A lengthy appeals process led to his death penalty sentence being thrown out before being reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022.

The second person on the list of convicted murderers who failed to attract Biden's sympathy is Dylann Roof, who, in 2015, entered Mother Emanuel AME Church, a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, killed nine people, and injured three more. Roof declared that he was motivated by hatred for black people and espoused white supremacist ideas. He was convicted and sentenced to death for his killing spree.

The last of the three men awaiting execution is Robert Bowers, who, in 2018, killed 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Like Roof, Bowers carried out his killing spree with the expressed motivation of killing members of an ethnic group, in this case, Jews, in what was the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. In 2023, the Biden Justice Department obtained a death penalty conviction for Bowers, and he is awaiting execution, pending the appeals process.

DEI clemency

Roof, Tsarnaev, and Bowers deserve to die for their crimes. Their ideologically motivated murders destroyed innocent lives, shattered families, and created deep and enduring wounds in the communities to which their victims belonged.

But what of the 37 other convicted murderers who, until Biden's intervention, faced lethal injection? They all committed murder. Their victims included children, police officers, and members of the military. Some of these murderers committed other crimes in the process of killing their victims.

Take Jorge Torrez, for instance. In 2014, he was sentenced to death for the 2009 murder of 20-year-old Naval Officer Amanda Jean Snell. Torrez killed Snell while he was a member of the U.S. Marine Corps and had a history of attacking women. In 2018, he pleaded guilty in Illinois to two more slayings. The victims? Eight-year-old Laura Hobbs and 9-year-old Krystal Tobias, whom he stabbed to death in 2005.

Torrez killed as many people as Tsarnaev did with the bomb at the Boston Marathon in 2013. But without a media spotlight on a coherent ideology explaining his vicious acts of violence toward young women and girls, Biden finds that Torrez's life is worth protecting rather than fulfilling his duty as the executor of the nation's laws and securing justice for Snell, Hobbs, Tobias, and the other women he attacked.

Thomas Hager tortured and killed Barbara White in 1993. He and two accomplices beat the 19-year-old woman in front of her 13-month-old daughter, attempted to electrocute and drown her, and stabbed her to death. But after waiting 30 years to see justice done, White's family will now never see it carried out. Because Hager didn't kill and torture White in service of his ideology, Biden determined that Hager gets to live out the rest of his days and die a natural death.

The killing of White illustrates more than most other cases how absurd Biden's claim is that the death penalty should only be used for "terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder." Hager hated White. He would not have tortured her and subjected her to a gruesome and painful death if he hadn't. Torrez did not strangle Snell with a computer cord because he was ambivalent about her. These men hated their victims, and they planned and sought them out to kill them because they hated them.

Rather than treat all life as sacred, Biden decided that only the victims of three terrorists were worthy of the justice decided for them by due process. He subverted the criminal justice system and the laws of the United States to a political ideology that attaches greater value to victims because of the expressed political or ideological motivations of their killers, rather than recognize that all 40 people on death row were equally guilty of destroying families and communities and had shown a blatant contempt for the sanctity of human life.

Biden's clemency would have been more defensible if it had extended to include the three most high-profile cases he omitted. It would then have at least been consistent in principle. It would have declared that he opposed the death penalty for any and all offenses. It would still have been a blatant rejection of the legal system that had sentenced the men to death, but it would at least have indicated intellectual honesty on the issue.

Instead, he picked winners and losers. He determined that White did not deserve the same justice as Krystle Marie Campbell, who lost her life at the hands of Tsarnaev at the Boston Marathon bombing. He declared that "we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level" and then continued it for killers he and his politically motivated team deemed too controversial to spare, turning capital punishment into a punishment of ideology, not murder.

Biden spent four years in office forcing the government to install a diversity, equity, and inclusion regime that created a system of winners and losers based on ideology, race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. By sparing 37 murderers of the death penalty while condemning three others because of their ideology, he determined that murder victims, too, must be given a hierarchy of victimhood and has sacrificed justice at the altar of equity.