President Joe Biden announced the commutation of 37 federal death row prisoners’ sentences to life imprisonment without parole. This action included two inmates from Illinois. The announcement came as President-elect Donald Trump, a vocal supporter of capital punishment, prepared to assume office and resume federal executions.
Most of the commuted sentences stemmed from relatively low-profile cases. Among those from Illinois were Jorde Avila Torres, convicted of the 2005 murders of eight-year-old Laura Hobbs and nine-year-old Krystal Tobias in Zion, and sentenced to death for a separate murder in Virginia; and Ronald Mikos, a Chicago doctor sentenced to death for murdering a patient who was to testify against him in a Medicare fraud case.
Only three federal inmates remain on death row facing execution: Dylann Roof, responsible for the 2015 Charleston church shooting; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber; and Robert Bowers, who perpetrated the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.