Just the other day, I snarkily twitted:

Can somebody wake President Biden up and remind him that he still needs to commute the sentences of federal death row prisoners to life?

And I’ll be damned. someone did.

President Biden on Monday commuted the sentences of nearly all prisoners on federal death row, sparing the lives of 37 men just a month before Donald J. Trump will return to the Oval Office with a promise to restart federal executions.

Those affected by Mr. Biden’s action, all of whom were convicted of murder, will serve life imprisonment without the possibility of parole instead of facing execution.

Trump has demonstrated no interest in sparing federal prisoners from their sentences, unlike, say, Crazy Joe Arpaio. Indeed, one might surmise that Trump sees federal executions as performative exercises in pseudo-masculinity, rushing to kill people to prove how tough he is. After all, you can’t make any headlines from people getting the slow death penalty when there is flashy execution to be had from the slightly faster one.

While Biden halted executions, he neglected to commute the sentences until now, leaving open the probability that Trump would put on a show of manliness when he needed something to prove he didn’t have small, girly hands. Biden, finally, did something to prevent that from happening, although it remains a mystery why he waited until the end of his term to do what he promised to do beforehand.

“I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” Mr. Biden said in a statement on Monday. “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

But President Biden left three prisoners on death row, their executions uncommuted and their killing still good for a political passion play.

The three men who can still face federal execution are Robert D. Bowers, 52, who in 2018 gunned down 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh; Dylann Roof, 30, the white supremacist who in 2015 opened fire on Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, S.C., killing nine people; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 31, one of the two brothers who carried out the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013 that killed three and maimed more than a dozen others.

The murders these three defendants committed were horrific. They were not only mass murders, but recent murders, such that most of us still remember the horror of their crimes and the outrage their conduct causes. But by failing to commute their sentences, Biden blew the opportunity to make his point, the right point. The issue was never whether the terrible crimes they committed deserved the death penalty. The issue was never whether these three individuals deserved to die. Their crimes were terrible and they deserved, to the extent deserve has anything to do with it, to die for their crimes.

But so too did others whose sentences were commuted. It isn’t the number of people killed, or the public sentiment as opposed to the private grief that made their murders horrific. It was the crime itself, so evil that its perpetrator had forfeited any right to continue to breathe air. And yet here Biden was, doing the very thing that can’t be done, drawing lines upon lines about who deserved to live and die, about whether our legal system is sufficiently reliable that anyone, no matter how evil, should be put to death.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since 1973 at least 200 people in the United States who were convicted and sentenced to death have been exonerated. Often, appealing to the president is the last action that can spare a prisoner’s life. But the president’s powers of clemency are limited to those who committed federal offenses, a small fraction of the people sentenced to death in the United States.

Granted, Biden lacked the pardon power to do much more than make a point, that the system too often fails and that the heated passion of outrage of the moment later gives way to reasoned consideration that doesn’t always back up the certainty of guilt following the outcry of anger and grief at the moment the crimes are committed. We know this. We know that innocents have been executed, like Cameron Todd Willingham. It’s one thing for criminals to commit senseless murder, but another entirely for the government to do so.

Of the 37 men whose sentences were commuted, 15 are white, 15 are Black, six are Latino and one is Asian. They were sentenced in 16 states, including three that have abolished the death penalty. Nine are on death row because they were convicted of killing fellow federal prisoners.

Does this show that black men are more likely to be sentenced to death than white men? Rather than argue the point, what if the answer was that no one, regardless of race or sex, should be sentenced to execution, but rather left in a cell for the rest of their life? If they killed a fellow prisoner, then their life will spent in the misery of isolation so they can’t kill another. And if it turns out, whether because of changes in science like DNA, or forensic techniques like bite mark analysis, or burn pattern analysis, or shaken baby syndrome, that there was no crime or that the defendant was innocent, there is still a living person to free.

The three men left, whose sentences of death remain uncommuted, do not necessarily deserve the mercy, if you can call the slow death sentence mercy, that commutation affords. And even if their sentences were commuted from death to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, they would never again breathe free air. But they would demonstrate the principle that our legal system, even if it is better than the others, is imperfect, and no one should be executed after conviction by an imperfect system, no matter how much you believe they deserve it.