Today, President Biden announced that he is commuting the sentences of 37 individuals on federal death row. Those individuals will have their sentences
Oh look, the crypt keeper IS actually capable of using executive power for the rare good action. Do prisoners who had drug charges similar to Hunter's get released? No no, that's just for nepo babies. But at least he'll gesture at amnesty to pretend he's not nakedly abusing that power for it's own sake.
Nah, fuck that. This should be the absolute minimum. If a president can just do this, he should do this for literally every single person who ever gets a death sentence.
actual human people are apparently not going to be executed that the following admin would almost certainly accelerate the process to kill. it's a good thing. it's not ENOUGH by any means but it is at least the correct direction of travel unlike pretty much every other Biden admin thing other than labour (which was also Not Nearly Enough). it goes without saying he would still get the wall. I can in fact hold both of these thoughts in my head at once just fine.
The usual practice is to pardon a handful of people to improve the optics of pardoning cronies and rich campaign donors. They call them "packing peanuts", the people they pardon to protect the ones they really wanted to give them to.
When Trump was leaving office last time they literally went on a McKilling spree and McKilled thirteen people.
The number of federal death sentences carried out under Trump since 2020 is more than in the previous 56 years combined, reducing the number of prisoners on federal death row by nearly a quarter.
National Academy of Sciences Reports Four Percent of Death Row Inmates are Innocent
There were fourty people on federal death row, only three left after the pardon: the Boston Marathon bomber, the Charleston church shooter, and the Boston synagogue shooter. So basically everyone except the mass murderers.
Sure, but the president has a lot of power he can use to control a governor. Both through the legal powers of the presidency and extra-legal methods like sending them a picture of their spouse taken by a predator drone.