They weren’t run over by a reindeer.
President Biden on Monday commuted the sentences of 37 of 40 men on federal death row — a list that includes at least five child killers and several mass murders — in a stunning act of clemency just two days before Christmas.
Biden, 82, gave the reprieve to the nation’s most violent murderers — nine of whom were found too dangerous to live after butchering fellow inmates — as part of his effort at “ensuring a fair and effective justice system,” the White House said.
“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden said in a statement.
“But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”
Biden, who opposes the death penalty, lowered each of the 37 sentences to life in prison without parole. He did not say why specifically he considered the original penalties unjust.
Among those receiving the holiday cheer is Thomas Sanders, who in 2010 kidnapped and then shot 12-year-Lexis Roberts four times and cut her throat in Louisiana — days after the girl watched as Sanders murdered her mother on a road trip near the Grand Canyon.
Christmas also came early for Anthony Battle, who murdered an Atlanta prison guard with a hammer in 1994 while serving a life sentence for raping and murdering his wife, a US Marine, in 1987 at Camp Lejeune, NC.
Jorge Avila-Torrez sexually assaulted and stabbed to death two girls — Laura Hobbs, 8, and Krystal Tobias, 9 — who had been riding their bicycles in their neighborhood in a suburb north of Chicago in 2005.
Four years later, he strangled naval officer Amanda Snell, 20, inside her barrack in Arlington, Va.
Iouri Mikhel, another clemency recipient, was convicted of murdering five Russian and Georgian immigrants after kidnapping them for ransom, which in some cases was paid before he killed them anyway.
Kaboni Savage, meanwhile, was convicted of committing or ordering the deaths of 12 people including four children as a Philadelphia drug dealer — while James Roane, Jr. participated in the murder of 11 people as a drug dealer in Richmond, Va.
Three men on federal death row did not get a commutation: Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who along with his brother killed three people in 2013; Robert Bowers, who killed 11 at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; and Dylann Roof, who killed nine black Charleston churchgoers in 2015.
Biden has often flexed his presidential clemency powers in the past month.
The retiring president on Dec. 1 issued a blanket pardon for his own son Hunter Biden, 54 — wiping the slate of his June conviction of three federal gun felonies and his September guilty plea to $1.4 million in tax fraud from foreign business dealings in which he repeatedly involved his father.
Biden also commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 people on Dec. 12 who had been temporarily released from prison during the COVID-19 pandemic — including Josephine Gray, the “Black Widow” who killed two of her ex-husbands and a third lover, and Rita Crundwell, who as comptroller of Dixon, Ill., stole nearly $54 million from the 15,000-person town over two decades.
Despite the spree of controversial actions, Biden has outraged cannabis activists by thus far failing to honor his 2019 campaign pledge to release “everyone” in prison for marijuana.
Instead, just before the 2022 midterm elections, he announced a mass pardon for people convicted of simple pot possession — of whom none were in prison, drawing outrage from prisoners who called it a “slap in the face.”