Pope Francis has called for commutations for people on death row in the US, as religious leaders, civil rights groups and current and former prosecutors urge Joe Biden to take executive action on capital punishment.
In his Sunday prayer, Pope Francis, who has been a vocal death penalty opponent, said: “It comes to my heart to ask all of you to pray for the prisoners in the United States who are on death row. Let’s pray that their sentence would be commuted [or] changed.”
On Monday, advocates fighting against capital punishment released letters from hundreds of leaders asking the president to clear federal death row before Donald Trump returns to office, with pleas from Black pastors, Catholic leaders, former prison officials, leading civil rights groups and mental health advocates.
Biden has been facing intensifying pressure to grant clemency to people with death sentences after he recently announced that he was using his executive authority to pardon his own son.
Related: Calls mount for Biden to spare federal death row inmates before Trump retakes office
Advocates expect the incoming administration to be deadly if Biden doesn’t take action. In the final year of Trump’s first term, the US government executed 13 people in rapid succession, killing more people in the federal system than under the previous 10 presidents combined. The rushed process claimed the lives of people with intellectual disabilities, prevented defendants from presenting new evidence, and involved execution methods that lawyers said were “tortuous”.
Some of Trump’s first-term executions happened despite objections from prosecutors and victims, and took place after the US supreme court quickly overruled lower court decisions halting the proceedings.
The Catholic Mobilizing Network, which represents 30,000 advocates, including bishops and dioceses, urged Biden, who is Catholic, to commute every federal death row sentence, writing: “We know that the federal death row, just as in the states, is marred by significant arbitrariness, including racial bias and the imposition on vulnerable individuals such as those with intellectual disability, brain damage, and serious mental illness. There is also a risk that innocent people will be put to death.”
Biden has previously opposed capital punishment and issued a moratorium on executions when he became president, but he has not yet indicated whether he will commute sentences.
There are 40 men currently on federal death row, and 38% of them are Black, although Black people comprise 14% of the US population. Nearly one in four of the men were 21 or younger at the time of the crime. And 43% percent of them come from only three states – Missouri, Texas and Virginia.
In another letter released Monday, 38 current and former district attorneys, attorneys general and former US prosecutors and justice department officials laid out the flaws in capital punishment.
“We know that we have not always executed the worst of the worst, but often instead put to death the unluckiest of the unlucky – the impoverished, the poorly represented, and the most broken,” they wrote. “Time and again, we have executed people with long histories of debilitating mental illness, childhoods marred by unspeakable physical and mental abuse, and intellectual disabilities that have prevented them from leading independent adult lives. We have also likely executed the innocent.” The group also pointed to studies demonstrating that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent to violence and does not reduce crime.
A group of current prison officials, including some whom have overseen executions, pointed to the harms correctional staff face when carrying out capital punishment: “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.”
Families of murder victims also pleaded with Biden, wring that the death penalty “wastes many millions of dollars that could be better invested in programs that actually reduce crime and violence and that address the needs of families like ours”.
Related: Biden urged to use clemency powers to tackle ‘crisis’ of US mass incarceration
Others now urging Biden to act include the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a coalition of Latino advocacy organizations and the Innocence Project.
Trump intensified his pro-death penalty rhetoric during his campaign, calling for executions of “everyone who gets caught selling drugs”. And Trump allies, through the rightwing manifesto Project 2025, have called for the expansion of capital punishment and for the US to do “everything possible to obtain finality” for the 40 people on federal death row.
In an interview before the election, Billie Allen, who is on federal death row and has long maintained his innocence, recounted to the Guardian what it was like to witness rapid executions under Trump’s first term: “I came in at 19. These are people I grew up with. I’m seeing them be carried out, never to return again, never to see them smile or hear them laughing.”
He said he wished wished people recognized death row defendants were capable of change: “The majority of people here become better men for themselves, their family and friends and supporters.”
