The families of victims and others affected by crimes that resulted in federal death row convictions has shared their reactions last 23 December after President Joe Biden commuted dozens of the sentences.
Biden converted the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The inmates include people convicted in the slayings of police and military officers, as well as federal prisoners and guards. Others were involved in deadly robberies and drug deals.
Three inmates will remain on federal death row: Dylann Roof, convicted of the 2015 racist slayings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; the 2013 Boston Marathon Bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of life Synagogue in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S history.
Opponents of the death penalty lauded Biden for a decision they'd long sought. Supporters of Donald Trump, a vocal advocate of expanding capital punishment, criticized the move weeks before the president-elect takes office.
Victims' families and former colleagues share relief and anger.
Donnie Oliverio, a retired Ohio police officer whose partner, Bryan Hurst, was killed by an inmate whose death sentence was commuted, said the killer's execution "would have brought me no peace."
"The president has done what is right here," Oliverio said in a statement also issued by the White House.
But Hurst’s widow, Marissa Gibson, called Biden's move distressing and a "complete dismissal and undermining of the federal justice system,” in a statement to The Columbus Dispatch.
Tim Timmerman, whose daughter, Rachel, was thrown into a Michigan lake in 1997 to keep her from testifying in a rape trial, said Biden's decision to commute the killer's sentence offered families "only pain."
"Where’s the justice in just giving him a prison bed to die comfortably in?" Timmerman said on WOOD-TV.
Heather Turner, whose mother, Donna Major, was killed in a 2017 South Carolina bank robbery, called the commutation of the killer's sentence a "clear gross abuse of power" in a Facebook post.
"At no point did the president consider the victims," Turner wrote. "He, and his supporters, have blood on their hands."
Corey Groves, whose mother, Kim Groves, was murdered in a 1994 plot by a New Orleans police officer after she filed a complaint against him, said the family has been living with the “nightmare” of her killer for three decades.
"I have always wanted him to spend the rest of his life in prison and have to wake up every morning and think about what he did when he took our mother from us," Groves said in a statement through his attorney.