COLUMBIA, South Carolina >> Victims’ families and others affected by crimes that resulted in federal death row convictions shared a range of emotions Monday, from relief to anger, after President Joe Biden commuted dozens of the sentences.

Biden converted the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The inmates include people who were convicted in the slayings of police, military officers and federal prisoners and guards. Others were involved in deadly robberies and drug deals.

Three inmates will remain on federal death row: Dylann Roof, convicted of the 2015 racist slayings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of life Synagogue in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.

Opponents of the death penalty lauded Biden for a decision they’d long sought. Supporters of Donald Trump, a vocal advocate of expanding capital punishment, criticized the move as an assault to common decency just weeks before the president-elect takes office.

Donnie Oliverio, a retired Ohio police officer whose partner, Bryan Hurst, was killed by an inmate whose death sentence was commuted, said the execution of “the person who killed my police partner and best friend would have brought me no peace.”

“The president has done what is right here,” Oliverio said in a statement, also issued by the White House.

But Hurst’s widow, Marissa Gibson, called Biden’s commutation distressing and a “complete dismissal and undermining of the federal justice system,” in a statement to The Columbus Dispatch.

Heather Turner, whose mother, Donna Major, was killed in a 2017 South Carolina bank robbery, called the commutation of the killer’s sentence a “clear gross abuse of power” in a Facebook post, adding the weeks she spent in court with the hope of justice “just a waste of time.”

“At no point did the president consider the victims,” Turner wrote. “He, and his supporters, have blood on their hands.”

Decision to leave Roof on death row met with conflicting emotions

There has always been a broad range of opinions on what punishment Roof should face from the families of the nine people killed and the survivors of the massacre at the Mother Emanuel AME Church. Many forgave him, but some say they can’t forget and their forgiveness doesn’t mean they don’t want to see him put to death for what he did.