President-elect Donald Trump's transition team slammed President Joe Biden on Monday following his decision to commute the sentences for 37 out of 40 federal inmates on death row to life in prison without parole.
"These are among the worst killers in the world and this abhorrent decision by Joe Biden is a slap in the face to the victims, their families, and their loved ones," Trump's communications director, Steven Cheung, wrote in a news release on behalf of the transition team.
"President Trump stands for the rule of law, which will return when he is back in the White House after he was elected with a massive mandate from the American people."
Trump restarted federal executions after a nearly 20-year pause during his first term, but Biden put them on hold when he took office in January 2021.
Biden's decision excluded three of the most well-known inmates on federal death row: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted for his involvement in the bombing at the Boston Marathon finish line in 2013; Dylann Roof, convicted for a mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015; and Robert Bowers, who was convicted for the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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