For how "devout" President Joe Biden supposedly is in his Catholic faith, there's another area where he could do better in living up to it. In this case it's his lack of action on preventing the death penalty from being carried out. Unlike his pro-abortion stance, though, Biden is angering members of his own party.
Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, spoke to the Washington Examiner, saying that Biden's failure to act on the death penalty is "frustrating" to liberal Democrats.
Such inaction on the death penalty is not merely hypothetical. As Spencer reported, Biden's Department of Justice asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to reinstate the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston bomber.
The DOJ argued in a brief that "The court of appeals improperly vacated the capital sentences recommended by the jury in one of the most important terrorism prosecutions in our Nation’s history."
The court of appeals overturned such a punishment last July due to concerns with potential juror bias:
As the American Bar Association explained:
On July 31, 2020, a three-judge panel for the First Circuit Court of Appeals vacated Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence due to insufficient attention paid to potential juror bias during jury selection and the exclusion of relevant mitigating evidence. Mr. Tsarnaev was sentenced to death in 2015 after being convicted of multiple counts stemming from the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. The panel decision overturned his death sentence and vacated his convictions on two of the several counts on which he had been indicted; but because the majority of the counts on which he was convicted were upheld, the ruling does not create the possibility of release.
Democrats have reason to be angry, especially because it amounts to hypocrisy from Biden. As Spencer wrote:
The Biden administration's decision to maintain the position of the previous administration is contradicted by a Biden spokesperson who said in November 2020 that "the President-Elect opposes the death penalty, now and in the future, and as president will work to end its use."
Now that he's in office, though, Biden seems to have changed his tune, and Democrats are noticing. "One of the things that I think that he must have learned from his time as vice president was, if you have an informal policy of doing nothing so that you don't issue any execution notices and you don't carry out any executions, all that accomplishes is kicking the can down the road so that there are more people on death row for the next president to execute," Dunham told the Washington Examiner.
In writing for the Examiner, Naomi Lim pointed to legislative efforts from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), who is Catholic, and squad member Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA):
Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a member of the "Squad," and Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin are spearheading the Democratic-led legislative effort to abolish capital punishment and resentence the roughly 50 inmates on death row to life without the possibility of parole instead, including Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof. The House measure has almost 80 co-sponsors.
Pressley also circulated letters calling on Biden to commute the sentences of death row prisoners immediately and urging the president to roll back capital punishment permanently through executive order.
"I appreciate President Biden's stated opposition to the death penalty, but people's lives are in limbo right now," she told CNN in May.
The effort in question is the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act of 2021.
Over 240 organizations support the legislation. Not all are progressive organizations, as the list includes Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty.
As mentioned above, the Catholic Church opposes the death penalty. Pope Francis doubled down on such a position when he called the death penalty "inadmissible" in 2018 reaffirming it his 2020 encyclical, "Fratelli Tutti."
"A papal encyclical is one of the highest of all documents in terms of its authority, removing any lingering doubt about the church’s belief," Fr. James Martin, S.J. said in writing for America Magazine.
For those who would claim there is hypocrisy with President Donald Trump's Attorney General William Barr reinstating federal executions, Barr received criticism from the Catholic Church. While Trump is not Catholic, Barr is.