Pope, Bishops Beg Biden to Lift Death Penalty for Federal Prisoners Convicted of Murdering Jews, Children, Women
Earlier today, Biden commuted sentences for 1,500 people nationwide--includihng a Chinese national with a staggering amount of child rape images on his hard drive.
Pope Francis, the U.S. bishops, Democrat lawmakers, and human rights activists are begging President Joe Biden to commute the sentences of 40 criminals on federal Death Row in the waning days of his lame-duck administration.
“As President Biden prepares to leave office, please urge him to commute all current federal death sentences to terms of imprisonment before his term ends,” an Action Alert from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops pleaded on Monday.
“President Biden has an extraordinary opportunity to advance the cause of human dignity by commuting all federal death sentences to terms of imprisonment and sparing the lives of the 40 men currently on federal Death Row.”
Early this morning, The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets reported that Biden has provided clemency for 1,500 prisoners nationwide who were facing long sentences, including 39 people convicted of nonviolent crimes. The White House described it as “the largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history.”
This is a breaking element of the story, but one of the convicts who is now free is Shanlin Jin, a Chinese national living in Texas who was convicted of having 47,000 images of child pornography in his possession — including infants being raped. Jin was sentenced to 97 months in prison after pleading guilty, but Plano police stopped going through his computer after confirming 1,338 images.
Bishops Bat for White Supremacists
Those inmates Death Row include the notorious antisemite and white supremacist Robert G. Bowers, who in 2018 gunned down 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh — the worst antisemitic attack in American history that claimed the highest casualty of Jews.
The top echelons of the Catholic clergy are also asking Biden to save Dylann Roof, an avowed white supremacist who confessed to killing nine black parishioners during a prayer service at the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015.
An unrepentant Roof wrote in his journal: “I would like to make it crystal clear, I do not regret what I did. I am not sorry. I have not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed.” The killings were “worth it” and “there [is] nothing wrong with [him] psychologically,” he maintained.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who set off twin blasts near the crowded finish line at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013 — killing three people, injuring more than 260, and traumatizing the city — also is awaiting execution. Tsarnaev said he was motivated by the U.S. government “killing our innocent civilians” and as a Muslim, he couldn’t “stand to see such evil go unpunished.”
Daniel Troya and Ricardo Sanchez Jr. also face execution for the brutal slaying of a Florida family people in 2006. The duo killed Jose Escobedo, 28; his 25-year-old wife, Yessica; and their sons, Luis Julian, 4, and Luis Damian, 3, over unpaid drug debts. According to NBC News in 2009,
Yessica Escobedo suffered 11 gunshot wounds while cradling her two young sons in her arms in an apparent attempt to shield them. The boys were shot a total of 10 times. Jose Escobedo was shot five times.
Pope Francis Pleads for Death Row Criminals
On the basis of his Catholic faith, Biden is being asked to commute the sentences of 18 white men, 15 black men, six Latino men, and one Asian man, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
The bishops said they had been calling for the abolition of capital punishment since 1980, but had voted to oppose the death penalty as early as 1974.
The 1980 USCCB statement acknowledges “that Catholic teaching has accepted the principle that the state has the right to take the life of a person guilty of an extremely serious crime,” but argued that capital punishment was not “justifiable under present circumstances.”
In their plea to Biden, the bishops also cited Francis’s 2018 revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in which the pontiff turned centuries-old Catholic teaching on its head and declared the death penalty “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”
On Sunday, as Catholics worldwide marked the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Francis urged his audience at St. Peter’s to pray for the prisoners who are on Death Row in the United States “that their sentence be commuted, changed.”
“I believe there are 13 or 15 of them,” Francis mistakenly observed. “Let us think of these brothers and sisters of ours and ask the Lord for the grace to save them from death.”
Pope, Bishops Reluctant to Challenge Biden on Killing Unborn Babies
While Francis and the U.S. bishops have offered their unstinting support to Biden on his pro-immigration and anti-death penalty policies (Biden said during his 2020 campaign that he opposed capital punishment and vowed to push for its abolition), they have been reluctuant to directly confront him on his pro-abortion and pro-LGBT+ stance.
In 2021, the Vatican warned American bishops not to deny communion to pro-abortion politicians, including Biden, a regular Mass-goer and a close ally of Pope Francis.
The then-prefect of the Vatican’s doctrine watchdog, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, wrote to the American bishops, warning them that voting to bar pro-abortion politicians from communion could “become a source of discord rather than unity within the episcopate and the larger church in the United States.”
When the U.S. bishops finally voted on the heated topic in November 2021, after a year-long debate, they capitulated to Francis’s diktat — voting 222-8 not to bar pro-abortion Catholic politicians like Biden or Nancy Pelosi from receiving communion.
Lone prelates like Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, who opposed Biden taking communion, said he would refuse the sacrament to Pelosi if she presented herself at the altar.
“You have to follow Pope Francis’s line,” remarked leftwing Bishop John Stowe, of Lexington, Kentucky. If the president or Pelosi asked for communion in his diocese, he said, he would offer it. Stowe said he was grateful the final document “doesn’t name politicians and doesn’t get into a whole list of who may and who may not” receive communion.
Francis Contradicts the Bible and Church Teaching
Renowned Catholic philosopher Edward Feser is one of the distinguished academic voices arguing that Francis’s reversal of the death penalty contradicts “two millennia of clear and consistent scriptural and Catholic teaching.”
Feser writes:
The Church has always taught, clearly and consistently, that the death penalty is in principle consistent with both natural law and the Gospel. This is taught throughout scripture — from Genesis 9 to Romans 13 and many points in between — and the Church maintains that scripture cannot teach moral error.
Feser also notes that the Church Fathers upheld the death penalty, “including St. Thomas Aquinas, the Church’s greatest theologian; St. Alphonsus Liguori, her greatest moral theologian; and St. Robert Bellarmine, who, more than any other … illuminated how Christian teaching applies to modern political circumstances.”
The philosopher documents the evidence supporting the death penalty in his book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of the Death Penalty: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment coauthored with Joseph M. Bessette.
In the Noahic Covenant (Genesis 9:6), God categorically declares: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” The verse underscores the centrality of the death penalty in preserving the dignity of man as created in God’s image.
Democrats Join Bishops in Petitioning Biden
Meanwhile, Democrat lawmakers have joined the ranks of people asking Biden to offer clemency to the Death Row inmates.
“Today, on Human Rights Day, we call on President Biden to do the right thing — to use his clemency authority to commute the death sentences of the 40 individuals on Death Row, to resentence them to a prison term, and to save lives,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA).
Rep. Cori Bush (R-MO) called the death penalty “a barbaric, inhumane practice most often weaponized against the most vulnerable among us” because “the overwhelming majority of people on Death Row are black and brown.”
While the pontiff’s defenders claim that Francis’s declaration of the death penalty as “inadmissible” in the Catechism is a “prudential judgement” and not a contradiction of Church teaching since the Catechism is not a magisterial document, Francis has now made his anti-death penalty doctrine magisterial teaching by including it in his April 2024 declaration Dignitas Infinita.
Refuting the bishops’ claim, “The death penalty is pro-life. And those who oppose it usually aren’t,” argues The Stream’s John Zmirak.
“Part of human dignity is paying for your crimes. We don’t imprison people or execute them first and foremost to keep society safe. That’s a happy side effect. But it’s only right to do that if we’re also enacting justice.”
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.