They’re not. There are two different issues. Issue #1 is that the Biden administration believes the original sentence was imposed fairly. Issue #2 is that they’re opposed in principle to a federal death penalty. IANAL, but ISTM the two issues are legally distinct.
I consider myself a liberal, but find myself in agreement with you here. I think the standard should be “beyond a shadow of a doubt” rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” I also agree about facts being allowed to be introduced at the appellate level.
It does seem odd, though. Biden could commute his sentence and moot the case, or alternatively voluntarily dismiss the appeal, and not seek a new penalty phase. He has a moratorium in place on executions which will undoubtedly last his entire term, is opposed to the death penalty, yet will keep this one guy under a death sentence for…what exactly? He has the full lawful power to put his preferences into action here. He could empty the federal and military death row with the stroke of a pen.
It’s another of my criticisms of the U.S. death penalty system. It seems that we have a great propensity to talk tough about the death penalty, but in practice, very few jurisdictions (and few jurisdictions within those jurisdictions) really want to see executions.
Which I’m sure would just be great for his poll numbers. 
If opposing the death penalty on principle will tank his poll numbers, then that is what should happen if he opposes the death penalty. Or vice versa.
Or maybe the public would be happy to have a death penalty, but only reserve it for the Tsarnaev, the Dylan Roof, the McVeigh.
In any event, politics in this country has gone to hell when a dual and conflicting position like this can be taken so transparently without political consequences.
I don’t see a conflicting position. Biden is all about the politically possible and not the ideal. He’s a realist, not an idealist. He knows he can push his anti-death penalty agenda only so far. He can do what he’s done now with little backlash. But to be seen doing anything to help this particular mass murderer? No, that would be a bridge too far. Especially given where Biden’s poll numbers are now. He doesn’t have the political capital to pull this off. He has other things he wants to accomplish.
This is just how the world works. The ideological purist will be unable to get anything done. Politics is about the possible. That’s why I hate it whenever progressives make the perfect the enemy of the good.
Also its not as if he has to decide right now. He could wait to see how things pan out, and then commute his sentence at the last minute if he feels strongly enough about it.
IIRC Tim Kaine when he was Governor of Virginia said he wouldn’t pardon or commute death sentences en masse just because he was morally opposed to the death penalty. He said it wasn’t a proper use of the executive power, and it was up to the legislature of the commonwealth to remove capital punishment legislatively.
This was the issue in one West Wing episode. Bartlett was personally opposed to the death penalty, based on his Roman Catholic faith. An application for commutation landed on his desk and he had to decide what to do.
One of the concerns raised was his constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Congress had passed the death penalty; was it appropriate for him to commute, simply based on his own personal views? Would doing so raise a due process claim when a commutation application landed on the desk of the next president, that the death penalty now depended on the whims of the president, so was contrary to due process?
Or was it his duty to commute because he thought it was wrong, and had campaigned on ending the death penalty?
In the end, he doesn’t commute, the prisoner is executed, and in the last scene, Bartlett is in confession: “Bless me father for I have sinned.” Is he saying that he sinned in not commuting? That he’s not sure that he made the right decision? That he made the right decision as President, but now has the blood of the prisoner on his hands, when he could have stopped it?
That was also the episode where after Bartelet said he was wanting a sign, the priest told him the joke about the man who drowned after a flood , with God saying’ what are doing here , I sent you a radio report, a helicopter and a man in a boat"
Great episode, well a lot of them were.
I am implacably opposed to the death penalty. It’s evil.
If the President has the power to commute a sentence, then it is fair for the President to do so based on his personal view that the sentence is unjust, even despite any law Congress passes.
Here’s the scene. And yes, the priest is played by Karl Malden in his final acting role.
Right, as long as there’s the constitutional power of clemency, exercised discretionarily, that is the law of the land, and by design overrides what Congress may have passed, a jury found or a court sentenced. And the discretion includes acting on individual conscience if you so choose. If you feel guilty about having or not having chosen so, take it up with your spiritual counsel like that fictional scene portrays.
That too often we have seen it applied questionably, has created in many the impression that any grant of clemency, even mere commutation, is somehow a statement that what the person did was not so wrong. That is pernicious since it makes it so much harder to argue meritorious cases for clemency as clemency, not as absolution.
I would tend to agree with this and say that was what Biden was doing, but out of the other side of his mouth, he has imposed a moratorium on executions. If he was so concerned about upholding the law despite his personal beliefs, he would be executing people as well as fighting in the courts to preserve death sentences
The Supreme Court on Friday upheld the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers responsible for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing which led to the deaths of three spectators and a police officer, reversing a lower court decision.
The ruling was 6-3 along conservative-liberal lines.
“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority. “The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one.”
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/04/politics/tsarnaev-supreme-court/index.html
Here is the opinion: