ASMA KHALID, HOST:
When President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners on federal death row, he said the move was guided by his conscience and his long career in public service. The inmates whose sentences he commuted will now serve life in prison without the possibility of parole. Advocates against the death penalty praised the move, but some also pointed out that a handful of people remain eligible for execution. I spoke with Abraham Bonowitz. He's the executive director of Death Penalty Action. It's an organization that opposes capital punishment.
ABRAHAM BONOWITZ: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
KHALID: Well, thanks for being with us. First, let me get your reaction to President Biden's decision.
BONOWITZ: We're absolutely grateful for what President Biden has done, but he needs to finish the job. Every person that's left on the federal and the military death rows is being handed over to Donald Trump for execution. And one of the motivations that the president articulated in his statement was that he understood that and wanted to head that off. But he's left seven people for Donald Trump to execute, which Donald Trump has promised to do.
KHALID: Seven people total, you mean because there are some that are also, you're saying, on military death row.
BONOWITZ: That's right. There are four people on the military death row, which, you know, many of the groups working on this have not been mentioning, but we've been talking about that all along because that's also under the auspices of the president.
KHALID: So how do you make sense of the fact that the president did not commute the sentences of everyone on death row? In particular, three of the inmates on death row have been getting a lot of attention. That's Robert Bowers, who was convicted for a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue; Dylann Roof as well, who was convicted for the mass shooting at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina; and then Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted in that Boston Marathon bombing back in 2013. How do you make sense of the fact that the president is saying that he was guided by his conscience to commute the sentences of prisoners on death row, but then he left these exceptions?
BONOWITZ: Well, we at Death Penalty Action would like to believe that he's not finished. That's the only thing I can think of if he's talking about this being a conscious and a faith-driven act. Because if it's a moral act, then he's falling short. If you oppose the death penalty, and if you believe the government shouldn't have the power to kill, then you clear all of them.
KHALID: One of your board members, I understand, Rev. Sharon Risher, had a family member who was killed by Dylann Roof in that South Carolina church shooting, and she was angry, I understand, at President Biden for not commuting his sentence, is that right?
BONOWITZ: Well, that's correct. And I want to be clear. I've got seven board members, and three of them are murder victim family members who oppose the death penalty. And Rev. Risher is our board chair. And I think angry is the wrong word. It's disappointed.
KHALID: OK.
BONOWITZ: And ultimately, her reasoning has nothing to do with Dylann Roof and everything to do with the fact that every time an appeal comes up, every time something brings this issue into the news, she's forced to re-confront the day that her mother was killed and two cousins as well. And that the church that she grew up in was devastated. You know, and that's the problem with the death penalty and what it does to victim families where there's a death sentence in their case, is it forces this ongoing revisit of that most painful moment in their lifetime, and it forces them to live in that space. And I'm not speaking for victim family members. I'm not one myself unless you go back a few generations to the Holocaust. But this is the thing that consistently I hear. You know, if I've got to wait, I can't heal.
KHALID: I do want to ask you, Abe, though, about this idea of what victims want or what victims' families want. You know, just after this decision came out, the Trump transition team issued a statement saying that it was a slap in the face of victims and their loved ones. And so my question is, what say does a victim's family actually get?
BONOWITZ: The only people who should be speaking for murder victim family members are murder victim family members. But from a public policy perspective, if we're going to say that the death penalty is for victim families, then we have to be carrying out far more executions because, you know, 98, 99% of the murderers who are caught, convicted, who face the death penalty, don't get a death sentence, or if they do, it doesn't stay to the point of execution. So what we're really saying is fewer than 1% are eligible, you know, victim family members get this so-called vengeance of a death sentence and maybe an execution a couple of decades from now. But really, for 99% of the death-eligible cases, your loved one wasn't valuable enough. Now, how is that a fair public policy?
KHALID: Abe, we've been speaking here in this conversation about the role of forgiveness. But what do you say to people who are not ready to forgive?
BONOWITZ: You know, that is each person's own journey. What is the truth is that, you know, when a person can come to forgiveness, repeatedly, what I've heard them say is that relieved them of the burden of wanting vengeance, and they felt free. And that's what I feel myself. When I forgive somebody for doing something wrong, I no longer feel like I have to get vengeance or have even an apology because it's not about them. Forgiveness is for the person who forgives to relieve them of the burden of wanting vengeance.
KHALID: Well, thank you very much for joining us on the show.
BONOWITZ: Thanks for having me.
KHALID: Abraham Bonowitz is the executive director of Death Penalty Action.
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