In Boston, the Justice Department is pressing judges to uphold Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence. In New York, it’s asking jurors to impose the death penalty on a man who killed eight people in an attack on a bicycle path.
President Joe Biden campaigned on a pledge to work toward abolishing federal capital punishment but has taken no major steps to that end, though the Justice Department has imposed a moratorium that means no federal executions are likely to happen anytime soon.
The department continues to press for the death penalty in certain cases but not in others. In a Tuesday filing, federal prosecutors said they won’t seek it for Patrick Crusius, a 24-year-old accused of fatally shooting nearly two dozen people in a racist attack at a West Texas Walmart in 2019.
Advocates for abolishing capital punishment say mixed signals from the administration and silence from Biden — the first president to have openly opposed the death penalty — drives home that the Democrat has not made good on his campaign promises that so raised their hopes.
“The Biden administration appears to have no understanding that inaction, if it continues, will result in executions,” said Robert Dunham, who heads the nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. “The Biden administration executions will be carried out by a future administration. But they will be Biden executions.”
Here’s a look at the federal death penalty under Biden’s administration:
WHAT ABOUT ONGOING DEATH PENALTY CASES?
Under Merrick Garland , the Justice Department hasn’t sought the death penalty in any new cases. It also has withdrawn bids for capital punishment sought by prior administrations against more than two dozen defendants.
But U.S. prosecutors this month opened a capital trial in New York against Sayfullo Saipov, who is accused of using a truck in 2017 to mow down pedestrians and cyclists on a bike path by the Hudson River. The decision to seek death came under Trump but Garland allowed his prosecutors to continued to seek it.
In Boston, the Justice Department is pressing judges to uphold Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence. In New York, it’s asking jurors to impose the death penalty on a man who killed eight people in an attack on a bicycle path.

Apnews