Just Before Christmas, President Biden commuted the sentences of thirty-seven prisoners on federal death row to life in prison without possibility of parole. This made sense for his legacy, as both a politician and a Catholic—Pope Francis encouraged Biden to take this step. And Biden had campaigned as being against the death penalty, so in a way he was returning to a campaign promise that had appeared wobbly. He placed a moratorium on federal executions, but allowed his Justice Department to continue to seek the death penalty in two cases: for the shooter at the three congregations, housed at Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, attacked in 2018, and for the shooter at the Tops grocery store in Buffalo in 2022. Even as Biden gets accolades for the sentences he has commuted, the federal death row is still occupied.
My husband is one of those still being harmed by the continuing occupancy of a federal death row. It was not just the trauma of having almost been shot at his synagogue—New Light Congregation, which rented space at Tree of Life in Pittsburgh—but the entire death row trial and appeals process. Had the Justice Department decided not to pursue the death penalty, we would not have seen almost five years elapse between the crime committed in Squirrel Hill on October 27, 2018, and the beginning of jury selection in April 2023. By contrast, the shooter at the synagogue in Poway, Cal., was sentenced to life in prison in a much shorter time frame, because it was not a death penalty case. Sharon Risher, who lost her mother and cousins at the Mother Emanuel shooting, in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, could not make the issue any clearer. As she said recently, “I need the president to understand that when you put a killer on death row, you also put their victims’ families in limbo with the false promise that we must wait until there is an execution before we can begin to heal. Every time this case comes up, I am brought back to the day my mother and cousins were murdered, and I need that to stop.”
After we visited Charleston on Martin Luther King weekend in 2019, and heard about their experiences with a death penalty trial, my husband wrote to the attorney general to express his opposition to the death penalty, and I wrote many pieces opposing this form of punishment.
My husband is one of those who is still being harmed by the continuing occupancy of a federal death row.
The Torah prescribes the death penalty; later Jewish law firmly opposes it in most cases. Currently, all four of the major denominations in America—the Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Reform movements—have opposed capital punishment as it is currently carried out in the United States. Jewish tradition teaches that a Jewish court is bloodthirsty if it prescribes capital punishment more than once in seventy years. Though there are Jews in Pittsburgh and families of the victims who would like to see the death penalty applied, the bulk of Jewish teaching and current interpretation opposes it, as I have written elsewhere. The work of the jury is not being ignored in these cases; we all agree these men committed monstrous crimes and deserve a heinous death, but those of us who oppose capital punishment believe our society should not behave at the base level of its worst criminals. Rather than seeing an execution, I’d rather focus on how the shooter did not succeed at fomenting hate in Pennsylvania (a kosher-keeping Jewish governor named Shapiro was elected in a landslide in the state) or weakening Jewish support for welcoming immigrants, which was the reason why Congregation Dor Hadash, another renter at Tree of Life, was a target of the shooter’s animus.
The harm from death penalty killing radiates out. Those involved in the act of killing may suffer for years, as in the case of Shalom Nagar, the executioner of Adolf Eichmann. Nagar passed away recently; as he said in the movie The Hangman, he was haunted throughout his life by nightmares of Eichmann and his corpse. Any execution, even of a person who deserves the suffering he meted out to others, will cause trauma for those involved in the murder. In the United States, a group of retired corrections officers wrote to Biden, urging commutation: “We have witnessed the depression, suicide, substance abuse, domestic turmoil, and other manifestations of trauma in our colleagues that study after study has documented among correctional staff who are impacted by executions, and on those close to them.”
I’m disappointed that President Biden did not choose to commute the sentences of all those on death row. It would have been a profound moral statement and a legacy of opposition to an atrocious practice that the majority of the country no longer supports. I hope the president will choose to end his term by finishing the job of clearing death row, so his successor will not be able to commit any more murders than he did in his previous term and to finalize the moral statement about how wrong capital punishment is for our society.