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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump vowed Tuesday to “vigorously pursue” capital punishment after President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of the top federal death row inmate, in part to prevent Trump from doing so. to advance their executions.
Trump on Monday criticized Biden’s decision to replace the sentences of 37 of the other 40 people sentenced to life in prison without the option of parole, arguing that it was absurd and insulting to the families of his victims. Biden said converting their sentences to life in prison is consistent with the moratorium on federal executions in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass killings.
“Joe Biden just commuted the Death Sentence on 37 of the worst killers in our Country,” he wrote on his social media site. “When you hear the acts of each, you won’t believe that he did this. Makes no sense. Relatives and friends are further devastated. They can’t believe this is happening!”
WATCH: Why Biden commuted the sentences of 37 people on federal death row
Presidents historically have no involvement in dictating or recommending the punishments that federal prosecutors seek for defendants in criminal cases, though Trump has long sought more direct control over the Justice Department’s operations. The president-elect wrote that he would direct the department to pursue the death penalty “as soon as I am inaugurated,” but was vague on what specific actions he may take and said they would be in cases of “violent rapists, murderers, and monsters.”
He highlighted the case of two men who were on federal death row for the murder of a boy and a girl, admitted to killing more and had their sentences commuted through Biden.
During his election campaign, Trump called for expanding the federal death penalty, adding the death penalty to those who kill police officers, those convicted of drug and human trafficking, and immigrants who kill American citizens.
“Trump has been fairly consistent in wanting to sort of say that he thinks the death penalty is an important tool and he wants to use it,” said Douglas Berman, an expert on sentencing at Ohio State University’s law school. “But whether practically any of that can happen, either under existing law or other laws, is a heavy lift.”
Most Americans have traditionally eliminated the death penalty for others convicted of murder, according to decades of annual polls conducted through Gallup, but it has declined in recent decades. About a share of Americans favored capital punishment in an October poll, while about 7 in 10 Americans favored capital punishment for murderers in 2007.
Before Biden’s commutation, there were 40 federal death row inmates compared with more than 2,000 who have been sentenced to death by states.
“The truth is that all of these crimes are addressed through the states,” Berman said.
The question is whether the Trump administration would try to take over some state homicide cases, such as those related to drug trafficking or smuggling. It could also try to capture cases from states that have abolished the death penalty.
Berman said Trump’s statement, as well as some recent moves in the states, may simply be an effort to get the Supreme Court to reconsider a precedent that considers the death penalty a disproportionate punishment for rape.
“It would literally take decades to implement. It’s not something that happens overnight,” Berman said.
Ahead of one of Trump’s rallies on Aug. 20, his statements published in the media indicated that he would announce that he would seek the death penalty for rapists and child traffickers. But Trump never kept his promises.
One of the men Trump highlighted on Tuesday was ex-Marine Jorge Avila Torrez, who was sentenced to death for killing a sailor in Virginia and later pleaded guilty to the fatal stabbing of an 8-year-old and a 9-year-old girl in a suburban Chicago park several years before.
The other man, Thomas Steven Sanders, was sentenced to death for the kidnapping and slaying of a 12-year-old girl in Louisiana, days after shooting the girl’s mother in a wildlife park in Arizona. Court records show he admitted to both killings.
Families of some victims have expressed anger at Biden’s decision, but the president has faced pressure from human rights teams urging him to get Trump to step up the use of capital punishment for federal prisoners. The ACLU and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops are among the teams that applauded the decision.
Biden allowed 3 federal inmates to be executed. They are Dylann Roof, who committed the racist murders of black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 2013 Boston Marathon bomber; and Robert Bowers, who shot and killed 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U. S. history.
Associated Press writers Jill Colvin, Michelle L. Price and Eric Tucker contributed to this report.
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