WASHINGTON (NEXSTAR) — President Joe Biden announced 37 of the 40 inmates on federal death row will now face life in prison without the possibility of parole, instead of the death penalty. 

The commuted sentences include inmate Len Davis, a former New Orleans Police Officer who orchestrated the murder of a woman who filed a police-brutality complaint against another officer. It includes the sentence of Marvin Charles Gabrion, a man who was found guilty of raping 19-year-old Rachel Timmerman and killing her. 

“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers,” President Joe Biden wrote in a statement released 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.” 

President Biden excluded Dylann Roof, the murderer who killed nine Black members of the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015. He also excluded Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, and Robert Bowers, who shot and killed 11 congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018. 

President Biden hinted at the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump as a factor when deciding to commute the inmates on death row. 

“I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted,” Biden said in the statement. 

President-elect Trump called the commutations a “slap in the face” to victims and their families, through spokesperson Steven Cheung. 

His first administration oversaw the executions of 13 people, the most in 120 years.