Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law professor emeritus, praised President Joe Biden for commuting 37 federal death sentences, but he told Newsmax on Monday he found Biden's criteria "strange" regarding one he didn't commute.
Dershowitz joined "Newsline" to discuss why Biden didn't commute the sentence of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev while allowing at least five child killers — including Thomas Sanders and Jorge Avila-Torrez — and several mass murderers to live out their lives in prison.
"Look, I oppose the death penalty. I've been opposing it since I was a law clerk, even before that in 1962. So, I'm pleased," Dershowitz said. "Now the criteria seems strange; why he allows Tsarnaev to be executed. He was a very young man, deeply influenced by his older brother who was killed. And yet he commutes the sentence of merciless cop killers and children killers.
"You know, the clemency power of the Constitution really knows no law. It's completely discretionary. And I suspect Biden did this only because the Boston Marathon killing was such a high-profile, high-visibility case. But there's no rational reason for allowing Tsarnaev to go to his death and not allowing these merciless cop killers and baby killers to spend the rest of their lives in prison.
"It's just, you know, I understand it, but I can't justify it."
Dershowitz told show host Bianca de la Garza he doesn't expect preemptive pardons from Biden but does hope for "principled commutations."
"I hope," Dershowitz said, "we're going to see … pardons of the kind that President [Donald] Trump gave when he was president, of people who suffered what's called the 'trial penalty,' people who are offered five years in prison if they pleaded guilty, and then they got 50 or 60 years of prison if they refused to plead guilty.
"So the vast majority of their sentence was based not on the crime they were allegedly convicted of, but on their refusal to plead guilty.
"Those are the kinds of principled, principled commutations that President Trump did in the last days of his term. And I'm hoping that Biden will continue to give principled commutations to people whose sentences are too long based on their refusal to plead guilty."
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