Biden Moved These Men off Death Row. Trump Wants Them Back On.

That Biden commuted those federal sentences at all was somewhat surprising. He had campaigned on ending the death penalty, but once in office he sat on the issue, only turning to it a month after Donald Trump had won his second term. He left three men on death row, all three convicted of mass murder on federal hate crimes and terrorism charges.

Biden’s commutations seemed to infuriate Trump. Trump had allowed 13 people to be executed in the last seven months of his first term, overseeing more executions than any president in the preceding 124 years—since Grover Cleveland’s presidency. Trump wrote on Truth Social in response to Biden’s decision that, once in office, he would direct the Justice Department to “vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children.” Much like the bombing of small boats, masked agents, and chartered flights to foreign prisons, execution is another stage for the administration’s strongman story of protection against an abstract, regenerative threat. Expanding capital punishment, a refrain of the 2024 campaign, and the commutations, in particular, were the subject of one of the first executive orders on the day Trump came into office again. More executions were necessary to “restore order.”

As they’d already been tried and convicted in federal court, the men whose sentences Biden commuted were, on double jeopardy grounds, slightly out of the Trump administration’s reach. But not entirely. In the January order, titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” Trump announced that his attorney general would “evaluate whether these offenders can be charged with state capital crimes and recommend appropriate action to state and local authorities.”