President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW

Washington, DC 20500

President Biden,

As faith leaders serving hundreds of thousands of Black and indigenous congregants throughout the country, we applaud your commitment to eradicating racial bias and inequity and the steps you have taken toward that goal. The road to equity and reconciliation is long, but it must include truth & justice. We, as a collective body, write to urge you to use your clemency power to decisively advance racial justice by commuting all federal death sentences. During your campaign, you expressed opposition to the death penalty and promised to work to end it at the federal level. We were heartened by this stance. But while the Department of Justice’s pause on executions reflects a welcome change from the gruesome policies of the prior administration, this measure does nothing to remedy the racial bias, arbitrariness, and other problems that make federal death sentences unfair. Mr. President, you can and should fix these problems from the top by commuting all federal death sentences now.

Commuting all federal death sentences would bring immediate benefits. It would acknowledge and help redress the racial bias built into the federal death penalty system, allow vast government resources to be redirected to policies that actually improve public safety, and allow the families of victims and incarcerated persons to focus on healing instead of living in legal limbo. We know you are very familiar with the racist history of America’s death penalty. People of color are more likely to be capitally prosecuted, sentenced to death, and executed, especially if the victim is white. This is true in the federal death penalty system just as in the states. Today, 57% of those under a federal death sentence are people of color, and 40% are Black. There are Black men under federal death sentence who were convicted and sentenced by all-white juries. Seeking a federal death sentence instead of having a state prosecution has often served to “bleach” the jury pool in places like Richmond, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and St. Louis.

Federal prosecutors have appealed to racial stereotypes in pursuit of death sentences, and federal judges have blocked attorneys’ efforts to investigate racial bias by federal capital juries. These are the hallmarks of an arbitrary and unfair system. Further, many of those on federal death row today were sentenced as a result of the 1994 Crime Bill or other excessive policies of the 1990s that led to the over-federalization of crimes and the excessive punishment of so many people of color.

Commuting all federal death sentences would be an important step towards acknowledging that problematic legacy. The flaws that plague the federal death penalty system were on display between July 2020 and January 2021, when the previous administration executed 12 men and one woman. Seven of the 13 people executed were people of color, including 6 Black men. Those executed included people with intellectual disability, people whose mental illness was so severe they lacked any rational understanding of why they were being killed, people who had long ago redeemed themselves and devoted their lives to helping others, people who were barely older than children at the time of their crime, people whose cases were marked by egregious government misconduct and/or evidence of racial bias, and people whose victims’ family members opposed their execution.

While an execution moratorium will not prevent a future administration from perpetrating similar injustices, commuting all federal death sentences will do so.

In 1957, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. explained that “capital punishment is against the better judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.” Ending the death penalty in America will bring us closer to racial reconciliation, closer to a society that fulfills God’s promise. Commuting all existing federal death sentences is a powerful incremental step on the road to that goal, a step you can take with the stroke of a pen.

We are asking President Biden that you clear the federal death row now.

Sincerely,