Enterprise leaders and households of homicide victims are calling on President Joe Biden to commute the sentences of inmates on federal dying row.

Meta’s former Chief Working Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Sir Richard Branson signed a letter to Biden together with different distinguished enterprise leaders asking the president to “fulfill your marketing campaign promise of working to finish the dying penalty by utilizing your clemency energy to commute all federal dying sentences to a time period of life imprisonment.”

And it added: “We imagine this act will cement your legacy of management, compassion and advancing racial justice.”

A number of different advocacy organizations referred to as on the president to commute the sentences in letters launched on Monday. There are 40 folks on federal dying row, together with the gunman who killed 9 South Carolina churchgoers in 2015, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber and a person who fatally shot 11 folks at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.

Nearly all of the inmates are housed on the Particular Confinement Unit at US Penitentiary Terre Haute in Indiana, the placement of the federal dying chamber.

Relations of homicide victims, together with Valerie Lucznikowska of Warwick, New York, whose nephew, Adam Arias, died on the World Commerce Heart on 9/11, informed the president: “The dying penalty has solely extended an already agonizing expertise with a prolonged course of that leaves us with extra ache, despair, and isolation.

“The complicated, constitutionally mandated authorized course of causes many years of uncertainty and ready, which regularly resurfaces trauma and delays therapeutic.”

Throughout Biden’s presidential marketing campaign, he vowed to “work to go laws to remove the dying penalty on the federal degree and incentivize states to comply with the federal authorities’s instance.” Even inmates convicted of egregious crimes “ought to as an alternative serve life sentences with out probation or parole,” Biden’s marketing campaign web site said.

However advocates contend the president has completed little to see that promise by means of. Now, they’re calling on him to behave earlier than President-elect Trump takes the White Home. 13 federal dying row inmates have been executed throughout Trump’s time in workplace.

In his newest presidential marketing campaign, he promised to broaden using capital punishment and has expressed his help for group executions, hangings and firing squads in talking with advisers, Rolling Stone reported.

In current weeks, advocates have launched a fierce marketing campaign to squash Trump’s plans for federal dying row. The president-elect wouldn’t be capable to reverse the commutations if Biden enacts them.

On Sunday, Pope Francis joined their efforts.

“In the present day, it involves my coronary heart to ask all of you to wish for the prisoners in the USA who’re on dying row,” he mentioned from his window in Vatican Metropolis. “Let’s pray that their sentence could be commuted or modified.”

His phrases have been echoed by the Catholic Mobilizing Community, a gaggle of 30,000 advocates, together with Catholic bishops and dioceses, who additionally submitted a letter to the president.

The group mentioned there’s a threat that “harmless folks shall be put to dying” if the president doesn’t act. “It’s due to our ethical conviction… that we urge you to make use of your authority to commute the federal dying row earlier than leaving workplace,” the group mentioned.