WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden announced Monday he’s commuting the sentences of 37 out of 40 federal death row inmates, reclassifying their sentences to life without the possibility of parole.
"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 said in a statement released pre-dawn on Monday, “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.”
While many cheered the move – one Biden defended as in keeping with his administration’s moratorium on federal executions -- a local family whose daughter’s killer was among those granted clemency called the decision “reprehensible.”
Speaking to News4 Monday, Paul White said he has waited years for Thomas Hager to be put to death for the brutal slaying of Barbara White.
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He learned Sunday from the U.S. Attorney’s office that now won’t happen.
“It’s a disappointment and a loss of confidence in the government to do something like this,” he said, adding the decision “reopens old wounds.”
White said his 19-year-old daughter had fallen into the wrong crowd but was getting her life together when the young mother was murdered in an Alexandria apartment in November 1993.
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At the time of the killing, Hager – a local drug dealer with a violent history – was reportedly in hiding and nervous that White, who was friends with his girlfriend, would reveal his location.
“She had visited a friend and saw something she shouldn’t have seen,” Paul White recounted to News4.
That’s why prosecutors say Hager and two others beat, electrocuted, repeatedly stabbed and drowned Barbara in a bathtub. The killers left her 13-month-old daughter with her mother’s body, along with jars of opened baby food for the toddler.
It was Paul White who found them both.
“There’s a constant void,” he told News4.
Hager was convicted in federal court 14 years after White’s murder and was sentenced to death. The jury determined the murder was “especially heinous, cruel or depraved.” Hager has been on federal death row ever since.
Reached by phone, his mother declined to discuss Biden’s decision with News4. His original trial lawyer says he was surprised, but pleased, by the decision.
White’s father said the news was especially hard to take so close to Christmas and called it “reprehensible.” Paul White added the family has waited 18 years for the death sentence to be carried out, adding his family hoped that would provide “final closure.”
Two other men convicted in the killing did not face the death penalty and, according to Bureau of Prisons records, are expected to be released in 2025.
Biden’s move comes with just weeks left in his administration and years after Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a moratorium on federal executions in 2021. No federal inmates have been executed during Biden's presidency.
The three men who remain on federal death row are Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018; Dylann Roof, who killed nine people in a shooting at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers in 2013.
Barbara White's father said he doesn't understand how they are any different than his daughter's killer.
"They're all murderers," he told News4.
