Ayanna Pressley urges Biden to commute sentences of all federal death row prisoners

U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley is calling for President Biden to commute the sentences of all federal prisoners on death row — a push that could ultimately affect Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Pressley and U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., led 35 of their colleagues — including Massachusetts U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss — in sending a letter to Biden urging him to “immediately commute” the sentences of all 49 prisoners on federal death row and ensure a “fair re-sentencing process.”

“We appreciate your vocal opposition to the death penalty and urge you to take swift, decisive action,” the lawmakers wrote. “By exercising your clemency power, you can ensure that there would be no one left on death row to kill.”

The Trump administration executed 13 people. Biden, however, pledged during his campaign to eliminate the federal death penalty, and Pressley was among the lawmakers who had pushed the president to end its use on his first day in office.

Asked this week if the Biden administration would place a moratorium on the death penalty, press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden remains opposed to the death penalty, but, “I don’t have anything more for you in terms of future actions or mechanisms.”

Pressley is also pushing a bill to abolish the federal death penalty with Bush and U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

“State-sanctioned murder is not justice, and the death penalty, which kills Black and brown people disproportionately, has absolutely no place in our society,” Pressley said in a statement.

Pressley’s push comes as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs the fate of Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber.

Last July, U.S. Appeals Court for the 1st Circuit Judge Rogeriee Thompson threw out Tsarnaev’s death sentence, saying the convicted terrorist will have to face another jury to determine whether he’ll ultimately be executed. The 26-year-old’s life sentences — and his assignment to a notorious supermax prison in Colorado — remain in place.

Thompson’s 224-page opinion says the appellate court had to throw out the death sentence because the district court also didn’t do a good enough job in asking potential jurors in 2015 about what they’d read about the immensely high-profile case.

The feds challenged the ruling, appealing to the Supreme Court to overturn it. SCOTUS continues to weigh whether to take up the case, with a decision expected any week now.

Tsarnaev, a student at UMass Dartmouth at the time of the attack, and his older brother, Tamerlan, set off the two bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line in 2013, killing three people and wounding more than 260 others. The elder Tsarnaev was killed in a shootout three days later — run over by his brother fleeing in a car.

The bombing killed Martin Richard, 8; Krystle Campbell, 29; and Lu Lingzi, 23. More than 260 people were injured. MIT police officer Sean Collier, 27, was shot execution-style days later by the Tsarnaevs.

Boston police officer Dennis Simmonds, 28, injured in the Watertown shootout in which Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed, died in April 2014.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2LPgBZv