Catholic group calls on Biden in final days to commute death penalty sentences

WASHINGTON (OSV News) — Catholic Mobilizing Network, a group that advocates for the abolition of capital punishment in line with Catholic teaching, issued a statement Nov. 6 urging President Joe Biden to take action on the practice during the remainder of his presidency while 40 lives on death row “hang in the balance.”

Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, CMN’s executive director, noted in a statement that Biden became the first U.S. president in 2020 to have campaigned on an openly anti-death penalty platform. She argued Biden should follow through with concrete action in the post-election lame-duck period before President-elect Donald Trump, who has sought to expand the use of capital punishment, returns to the White House.

“As faithful anti-death penalty advocates, we know lives hang in the balance; we are ready to act,” Vaillancourt Murphy said. “Our work will not be over until capital punishment has been completely abandoned in the United States. CMN will redouble its efforts to urge President Biden to commute the sentences of all 40 men currently on federal death row before he leaves office in January.”

After Biden was elected, his administration declared a moratorium on federal executions, but some activists have argued the nation’s second Catholic president has not delivered on a campaign promise to end the practice, and that his administration has defended some existing death sentences.

Since Biden’s lame-duck period, Vaillancourt Murphy said, “converges with the beginning of Jubilee 2025, it is fitting that he should act on his faith and do what is squarely within his constitutional authority to do.”

The Catholic Church’s official magisterium opposes the use of the death penalty as inconsistent with the inherent sanctity of human life, and advocates for the practice’s abolition worldwide. In his 2020 encyclical “Fratelli Tutti,” Pope Francis addressed the moral problem of capital punishment by citing St. John Paul II, writing that his predecessor “stated clearly and firmly that the death penalty is inadequate from a moral standpoint and no longer necessary from that of penal justice.”

“There can be no stepping back from this position,” Pope Francis wrote. Echoing the teaching he clarified in his 2018 revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the pontiff said, “Today we state clearly that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible’ and the church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide.”

Vaillancourt Murphy said the Catholic Mobilizing Network is organizing a petition, hosted at catholicsmobilizing.org, asking Biden to commute the remaining death sentences “in the spirit of mercy and the kind of justice that upholds the dignity of all life, no matter the harm one has caused or suffered.”

“While federal executions have been paused for the last four years, 40 lives are currently at stake,” she said. “We know approaches to the federal death penalty can change quickly under new leadership.”

Trump, she continued, “has a sordid history with executions,” and previously resumed federal executions during his first term after a pause of nearly two decades, carrying out 13 executions in a “resurgence of government-sanctioned violence at the federal level.”

“More recently, on the campaign trail, Mr. Trump spoke of death penalty expansions and expeditious executions,” she said. “This history informs CMN’s next steps. Now is not the time to step back from death penalty abolition.”

Vaillancourt Murphy said her organization’s work “will continue no matter who is in the White House,” and pointed to the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s teaching that the death penalty “is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” and that the church “works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”

“We know the death penalty does not deter crime or make communities safer,” she said. “Like the state systems, the federal death penalty system is broken. So we will keep praying and advocating and educating and sharing restorative practices until this system of death is dismantled and our communities flourish amid a culture of life.”

Catholic Mobilizing Network’s petition to commute the remaining federal death penalty sentences can be found here: https://catholicsmobilizing.org/take-action/tell-president-biden-commute-the-federal-death-row/

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