There are 40 men on federal death row who have been convicted of capital offenses by the federal government going back as far as 1993. The offenses committed by federal death row inmates include drug-related murders, a murder in a national park, killings during terrorist attacks, and the fatal shooting of a bank guard during a robbery. Eighteen of them are white; 15 are Black; six are Latino; one is Asian.

All told, there have been 50 federal executions in the past century, 13 of which were carried out by the Trump administration between July 2020 and January 2021.

In contrast, Biden has a mixed record on capital punishment. Unlike his predecessor, he has not carried out any federal executions, but, as the Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig explains, “neither has he instructed [Attorney General Merrick] Garland to stop pursuing new death sentences, or to stop defending ongoing capital cases.”

Now that the 2024 election is over and Trump will be returning to the White House, it is even more important that President Biden do as I urged him to do last July and use his clemency power to empty the federal death row. He should make sure that none of the men now there will ever be put to death.

Sometimes it is hard to get out front and do the right thing. But in this case, Biden can follow in the footsteps of several governors who waited until late in their terms to issue mass commutations to people awaiting execution in their states.

That is the least that America’s first abolitionist chief executive can do. Like those governors, Biden has ample grounds to use his clemency power to advance the cause of justice and to save lives.

As former Sen. Russ Feingold wrote last year:

A blanket commutation would realize Mr. Biden’s anti-death-penalty stance and move the United States further along the path to abolition. It would also prevent another federal execution spree such as that carried out in the Trump........

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