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I would have grudgingly found it admirable if he'd reduced everyone's sentence based on pure conviction that the death penalty is invalid. That's what the pope would have had him do.
But leaving a few on there is just evil gloating that they don't oppose the death penalty, just want it applied by an NPR opinion poll, and only as vengeance for crimes against party-aligned ethnic groups.
I think it's more prosaic than that, they presumably say all the outrage about that judge in the last batch of commutations/pardonings and decided they couldn't be arsed to go through with all that again (and potentially hurt the Democratic brand) with Roof et al.
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Exactly. Either you are opposed to the death penalty OR you are saying only certain crimes are worthy of the death penalty and most but not all of these crimes were not worthy.
The question then is explain why
I think Biden on his own would have commuted every sentence except maybe Tsarnaev’s. His aides, I’m sure successfully pressured him out of pardoning Roof and Bowers because they honestly believe a white man killing black or Jew is a worse crime than the reverse; I’m guessing the neocons in the White House were opposed to commuting tsarnaev because terrorist.
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To be fair, Biden still has a month left in office, and he could very well commute the other three sentences at a later date. It would actually make political sense to do it this way, assuming the following is true:
Republicans wouldn't have given him credit for ideological consistency if he had indeed commuted the other three sentences.
Bowers, Tsarnaev, and Roof are the only three people on this list the average American has ever heard of.
Accordingly, the commutation of any of these three sentences would, on its own, be bigger news than the commutation of all of the others.
Biden's critics will revel in pointing out the lack of consistency.
Commuting the three biggest names on their own, at a later date, will generate bigger headlines than if they were part of a blanket commutation.
So, commute the death sentences of 37 people no one has ever heard of and see what the fallout is. Then wait a few weeks and commute the remaining three on the eve of the inauguration. If the story gets lost in the shuffle then it's proof that nobody really cares much and that the political fallout from the other 37 commutations will be minimal, and that they were only really a story due to a lack of other news in the run-up to Christmas. On the other hand, if the story becomes a big deal, it will take some of the wind out of Trump's sails at a time when his inauguration would otherwise be dominating the headlines. Especially since he'd theoretically be responding to Republican criticism about his own lack of consistency, and this probably wasn't the kind of consistency that they had in mind. Not saying this will actually happen, just idle speculation on how Biden could play this to his advantage.
That sounds like 3D chess except it’s losing the entire way.
Step 1: Biden allows child killers to get out of death penalty but not others. Reaction: Biden doesn’t think child killers deserve death but if crimes have a political dimension then death penalty is fine. Not a good look.
Step 2: Biden folds to pressure leading to commuting the 3 not commuted today. Reaction: Biden would rather let guys off who deserve death because Biden decided a child killer should not be killed and when he couldn’t stand the fallout somehow decided to let other people off who deserve death.
Except this isn't about Biden; it's about Trump. Biden's reputation as a politician isn't going to improve regardless of what he does. He could have signed death warrants for everyone on the list and it wouldn't matter. So whether or not Biden is willing to commute the sentences of baby killers isn't the issue here. If he had excluded one more name from the list the Fox News comment section wouldn't be full of people trying to discern some kind of general principle, and had he commuted all the sentences they wouldn't be talking about how good of a Catholic he is. the fact that there's an incongruity on a list of pardons isn't something anyone is going to care about for more than a few days. As far as Biden is concerned, his political career is over anyway, so whatever he does now is ultimately irrelevant. And it's not like Democrats are still trying to prop him up as one of the party greats.
Signing an order commuting the sentences of three of the country's most notorious criminals and timing the press release so it hits just before Trump is about to take the oath of office is just a giant middle finger, nothing more. It would piss Trump off to no end to have his parade rained on like that, and provide a distraction from his time in the spotlight. It's not 3D chess as much as it is being petty, but Biden can afford to be petty at this point.
If Biden tried to do that, then it reminds me of the meme “Jokes on you I was just pretending to be retarded.”
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I suspect that this was his original intent, but at some point in the process someone rushed into the room and said "sir, on Xitter they're saying that this means you're going to free [blah blah blah specific examples]", and he adjusted accordingly, but didn't see the ideological contradiction. Idiocy.
To be clear, even the explanation that it's about party-aligned ethnic groups, as @SteveKirk suggested doesn't get to a coherent set of principles. Let me introduce you to Kaboni Savage:
An infant and three other kids, presumably black, murdered over gangland bullshit.
No, the principle at play here seems to be whether the names involved were sufficiently well-known or not. There's no pattern to be found other than that, as near as I can tell. The commuted sentences include black, white, and Hispanic individuals. The victims denied justice are similarly broad across different ethnicities, across such identities as part-time postal workers, 12-year-old girls, the literal black baby mentioned in the above paragraph, and Russian immigrants targeted by their co-ethnic serial killers. The Boston bomber did not get a commute, which also puts a monkeywrench in the protection of aligned groups theory - it really does seem to be as simple keeping sentences if the public is actually familiar with the evils that were done.
Simple answer. Kabobi is black, so it doesn't count as a crime against blacks as a group
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