President Joe Biden is commuting the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates, the White House announced Monday.

The move will reduce sentences for all but three of the 40 inmates on federal death row. Biden said the commutations are “consistent with the moratorium my administration has placed on federal executions,” except for terrorism and hate-motivated mass killings.

The three people on the federal execution list who were not on Biden’s commutation list are Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing; Robert Bowers, convicted of the mass shooting in the anti-Semitic attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue; and Dylann Roof, who killed nine black churchgoers in a racially motivated shooting in South Carolina.

According to the White House fact sheet on the move, recipients of the commutations will have their sentences “upgraded from execution to life without the possibility of parole.”

“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, mourn the victims of their heinous acts, and mourn all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden wrote in a statement accompanying the commutations.

“But guided by my conscience and 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 federal death penalty,” Biden added.

The White House fact sheet said the move was an attempt to prevent President-elect Donald Trump from “enforcing execution sentences that would not be imposed under current policy and practice.”

This decision came after several notable figures and many activists called on Biden to act. Pope Francis called for commuting the sentences of Americans on death row during his Angelus address in October, the Vatican news source reported.

“Today I feel compelled to ask all of you to pray for the inmates on death row in the United States,” the pope said at the time, according to the report. “Let us pray that their sentences will be commuted or changed. Let us remember our brothers and sisters and ask the Lord for the grace to save them from death.”

Biden is a devout Catholic and will visit the Holy See next month as part of a trip to Italy, where he will also have an audience with the Pope.

Activists have been demanding for some time that Biden commute the sentences of many or all federal death row inmates. More than 130 civil and human rights groups wrote a letter to the president in early December calling on him to commute the sentences of “all individuals on federal death row.”

“The only irreversible action you can take to prevent President-elect Trump from renewing his string of executions, as he has vowed to do, is to commute the death sentences of those now on federal death row. “Your ability to change the course of the death penalty in the United States will be a defining, legacy-building moment in American history,” the letter said.

It is also a question of racial justice. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 38% of federal death row inmates are black — compared to 14% of the general American population, according to the Pew Research Center. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, about 56% of the 40 men on federal death row were men of color.

On CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, a close Biden confidant, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said he had called on the president to act, citing injustice in the justice system.

“There are some real questions about fairness in the death penalty process in the United States,” Coons said.

He added: “And I don’t know what President Biden will ultimately do, but I think there are reasons, both in terms of racial justice, due process and what it says domestically and in the world about our values.” “If we did, go ahead and execute all of these people instead of letting them spend the rest of their lives in prison.”