Biden commutes federal death sentence of three connected to South Carolina, Dylann Roof remains on death row

WASHINGTON (WCBD) – Three federal inmates with ties to South Carolina are among the dozens of people on death row whose lives will be spared after President Joe Biden commuted their sentences Monday.

Biden announced that he would convert the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row to life in prison. Among the excluded is Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine Black parishioners in a racist attack at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015.

The move spares the lives of people convicted in killings, including the slayings of police and military officers, people on federal land and those involved in deadly bank robberies or drug deals, as well as the killings of guards or prisoners in federal facilities.

Co-defendants Branden Basham and Chad Fulks were sentenced to death row in 2004 for the murder of Alice Donovan. The pair escaped from a Kentucky prison in 2002 and kidnapped Donovan from a Walmart parking lot in Conway, but her body was not found until 2009, according to previous reporting from Nexstar affiliate WBTW.

Brandon Council was sentenced to execution in 2019 for killing two bank employees during a robbery, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

All three men will continue to serve life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

“I’ve dedicated my career to reducing violent crime and ensuring a fair and effective justice system,” Biden said in a statement. “These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”

The Biden administration in 2021 announced a moratorium on federal capital punishment to study the protocols used, which suspended executions during Biden’s term. But Biden actually had promised to go further on the issue in the past, pledging to end federal executions without the caveats for terrorism and hate-motivated, mass killings.

“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’s statement said. “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.”

Monday’s announcement comes just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump, an outspoken proponent of expanding capital punishment, takes office.

Roof is one of three federal inmates still facing execution, along with 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018.

Worshipers were attending a bible study at the historic downtown Charleston church on the night of June 17, 2015.  A man they welcomed to attend the study — then 21-year-old Roof — pulled out a gun and shot nine innocent people.

S.C. Senator Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney (who was the church’s pastor at the time), Cynthia Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Rev. Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson were killed.

Three people in the room at the time of the shooting survived, including Tywanza Sanders’s mother Felecia Sanders, her granddaughter Ka’mya Manigault, and Polly Sheppard.

Rev. Pinckney’s wife, Jennifer Pinckney, and their then-six-year-old daughter, Malana, were in another room across the hall at the time of the shooting. They also survived.

Former Charleston Mayor Joe Riley said that while June 17, 2015, was the saddest day of his life, the days after were some of the proudest in his 40 years in office.

“The way the community responded to this most unspeakable act was beyond anything, and I’m a positive-minded person, that I could ever have imagined. People, the morning after, right there on Calhoun Street, white people and black people together, hugging each other, wiping away each other’s tears.”

This past June, on the ninth anniversary of the shooting, the church called upon members of the community to perform random acts of kindness in memory of the victims.

Local and state lawmakers also renewed their call for South Carolina to pass a law increasing penalties for hate-motivated crimes, an effort that repeatedly stalled in the state Senate.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.