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…
