Martin Sheen: Why President Biden Should Commute Death Row

During the seven years I spent portraying President Josiah "Jed" Bartlet on The West Wing, I developed deep respect for the presidency and the monumental challenges its real-life officeholders confront every day. Recent news about President Biden’s exercise of his clemency power has drawn my memory to one of the most difficult “decisions” I made as President Bartlet—one that has stayed in my mind over the ensuing years—to deny clemency to a federal prisoner and allow his execution to proceed.

Both my fictional White House staff and the viewing public recognized at the time that this was not President Bartlet’s finest hour. I myself urged Aaron Sorkin, the showrunner, to write a different ending.

Allowing the television execution to proceed was a dramatic—and believable—outcome back then. In early 2000, when the episode aired, Americans still overwhelmingly supported capital punishment. Many of our elected leaders, including our presidents, shared those views. Just a few years earlier, Bill Clinton left the presidential campaign trail to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a Black man with an IQ of just 70 on Arkansas's death row.

President Biden now has the opportunity to make a much better decision than President Bartlet did, by commuting all federal death sentences. And he has good reason to. In recent years, we have become more aware of the death penalty’s many shortcomings. These shortcomings include racial bias, the law's rudimentary acknowledgement of the effects of brain damage and mental illness, prosecutorial misconduct, shoddy defense representation, and the intolerable risk of executing the innocent. Additionally, nearly a quarter of the men on federal death row were very young, 21 or younger, when they committed their crimes.

People across the political spectrum have come to question the continued use of the death penalty. Today, we know far more than we did in 2000 about the death penalty’s failure to deter crime, the enormous public resources it drains, and the trauma it inflicts on the people tasked with carrying out executions. If there is one thing I have learned about politics, both from my experience on The West Wing and from my many decades of activism, it is that a policy exacting such extreme costs for so little benefit should be considered a failure.

My views about the death penalty are neither recently adopted nor abstract. I began questioning the morality of death sentencing as a child because of my concern that, for political gain, the government was about to execute an innocent person. 

In the 1970s, as a young actor, I twice played the roles of real-life men who were executed. I played a Korean War veteran executed for several murders in Badlands (1973) and the only soldier post-Civil War to be executed for desertion in The Execution of Private Slovik (1974.) These roles forced me to consider broader problems with the death penalty, including that it is ultimately dehumanizing for all involved. 

Most significantly, I have spent the past two decades corresponding with a person on death row and have visited him in prison. I have seen this man express deep remorse with a clear recognition of the harm the death of his victim caused. I have also seen him engage in heartfelt religious contemplation and introspection. He is very different from the person who was sentenced to die. My relationship with him has demonstrated to me what I've always believed: that human beings have an extraordinary capacity to grow and change.

President Biden made history in 2020 when he became the first American president to openly oppose the death penalty. He now has the opportunity—and the support from Catholic leaders, corrections officials, prosecutors, civil and human rights organizations—to enshrine his legacy of justice, compassion, and positive change. He now has the opportunity to save the lives of real, not fictional, human beings by commuting all federal death sentences. I urge him to do so.