New Prison Policy Initiative briefing urges outgoing governors and Prez to grant capital clemency

The Prison Policy Initiative is aparently okay with one group of prisoners potentially spending longer in prison, as it has this new briefing urging clemency action to take condemned murderers off death row.  The themes of the briefing is spelled out in the full title: “Talking turkey about the death penalty: outgoing governors and the president must use their clemency power now: President Biden and three governors should use their clemency powers before they leave office to save the lives of people facing the death penalty, our nation’s cruelest punishment.”  Here is how the report gets started:

Every November, it has become a light-hearted tradition for the president and some governors to “pardon” turkeys before the Thanksgiving holiday, sparing them from the dinner table. But when the nation’s political leaders take part in an annual turkey pardon, it’s hard not to think about the chronic underuse of clemency powers across the U.S., especially for people on death row.

If turkey pardons are about choosing life over death, using clemency powers to empty remaining death rows is a straightforward way for elected leaders to act on those values and reject a horrific practice. President Biden and the outgoing governors of North Carolina, Indiana, and Missouri in particular can use clemency for those facing a state-sanctioned death before they leave office early next year. More than a dozen other governors can stop executions in their states, too, by exercising their unilateral power to modify or reduce criminal convictions and sentences at any time.

In this briefing, we show that the outgoing president and some governors’ tactless traditions of granting relief to turkeys casts a harsh light on their records of granting relief to people condemned to die. Ultimately, their legacies won’t be shaped by crass Thanksgiving rituals, but by how they tapped their power to intervene in the moral atrocity that is the death penalty.