Joe Biden Breaks Campaign 'Promise' as Justice Dept. Pursues Death Penalty for the Buffalo Mass Shooter

Joe Biden's administration has decided to pursue capital punishment in the case of Payton Gendron, the white supremacist who killed ten black people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store in 2022. However, the incumbent President painted himself as a death penalty abolitionist in 2020, and to many, it seems that now, he is backpedaling on his promises. 

The United States Justice Department said in a court filing on Friday, January 12, 2024, that it would seek the death penalty for Gendron, whose motivation to kill was his 'animus toward Black persons.' The killer had already pleaded guilty to the charges and was given a life sentence in February 2023, per Reuters.

Gendron was 18 years old at the time when he carried out the mass shooting of black people. His defense lawyers at the time said if the government no longer considered the death penalty, he'd plead guilty to several federal charges, including hate crime and firearm offenses. However, it seems the Biden administration has sealed his fate. 

It is worth noting the 81-year-old was the first President to campaign on abolishing the federal death penalty. In fact, he also lived up to his promise, upsetting many lawyers. During his presidential run in 2020, his criminal justice platform took a pledge on its website to "work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level and incentivize states to follow the federal government's example." 

Biden admitted that America's death penalty system is rife with errors and unfairness, which leads to many innocent lives being hanged to death. He also wrote against it on X, formerly Twitter, in 2019, "Since 1973, over 160 individuals in this country have been sentenced to death and were later exonerated. Because we can't ensure that we get these cases right every time, we must eliminate the death penalty." 

His staunch disregard against capital punishment led to people's support of his campaign. This further solidified his position as the White House candidate in 2020, with Americans backing him, especially the black community. Sharon Risher (whose mother and cousins were also murdered) said, "I love Biden, I love him as a politician and what he stands for. But on the death penalty, I just don’t think that he is doing what he said he would do," per CNN. 

But, now that the promise is broken, the Justice Department has vigorously defended its decision on the death penalty, as per Salon: "The department is defending death sentences even when there are concerning issues, like intellectual disability or severe mental illness of defendants, or racial bias and prosecutorial misconduct in those cases." 

Meanwhile, Gendron's court-appointed attorneys, MaryBeth Covert and Anne Burger, said in a statement, "Rather than a prolonged and traumatic capital prosecution, the efforts of the federal government would be better spent on combating the forces that facilitated this terrible crime, including easy access to deadly weapons and the failure of social media companies to moderate the hateful rhetoric and images that circulate online." It's the first case under the Biden administration where the Justice Department sought capital punishment, and it is historic and contradictory at the same time.