Trying to discern the principle behind President Joe Biden’s decision to commute the sentences of 37 notorious murderers to life in prison, but not three other multiple murderers, is difficult.

It is not that the death penalty is wrong, or that its use targets minorities, regardless of the seriousness of their crimes, nor is it that we are uncertain about the guilt of those we have the machinery to kill the law enforcement authorities would use.

If it were one of these principles, Biden would not have left these three men on death row, including Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Muslim convicted of the Boston Marathon bombing. He is widely considered to be the junior partner in the murder, who would not have been sentenced to death if his brother, the plot’s mastermind, had not died before he could be arrested.

In a White House statement, Biden said the commutations were “consistent with the moratorium my administration has placed on federal executions in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”

For Biden, terrorism justifies Tsarnaev’s continued death penalty, while hate justifies the planned state killing of two more people: Dylann Roof, the murderer of nine innocent people praying in a black church, and Robert Bowers, who targeted a synagogue in his anti-Semitism has a series of murders in which eleven Jewish people died.

In Biden’s view, the death penalty should not be about the number of deaths or the heinousness of your actions, but about what we think of your motives. Consider the following sentence transformations:

The aptly named Philadelphia drug dealer Kaboni Savage was convicted of personally killing or ordering the killing of 12 people. It is more acceptable to protect your drug gang, which primarily targets black people, than to kill nine people because they are black.

Former police officer Len Davis ordered the murder of a woman who had the audacity to file a report against him with the New Orleans Police Department. There is nothing more destructive to American society than a police officer killing a black woman for standing up for her rights. The killing of innocent black people by racist police officers is pretty much the oldest form of terrorism that exists in America.

But even worse is the fact that, according to the logic of Biden’s commutations, killing black and Jewish people is somehow hateful, while sexually assaulting women or killing people because of their immigration status does not count as hate, like these others in life sentences commuted sentences in prison:

Iouri Mikhel killed five immigrants from Eastern Europe after holding them for ransom. In some cases, he killed them anyway, even after receiving the demanded ransom. If that isn’t hate, I don’t know what is.

Richard Allen Jackson was found guilty of kidnapping, raping and then killing a 20-year-old jogger. He didn’t do it because he liked women. Like Jorge Avila-Torrez, who sexually abused and then killed two little girls, his crimes were born of a deep-seated hatred of the fairer sex.

Biden’s White House statement said: “I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.” That would be fine with me. If Biden had commuted the sentences of all the scumbags on death row and left them to rot in prison for life, I could have respected his decision. I have my own doubts about the fairness of our death penalty system.

But he didn’t do that. He retained the death penalty for the worst of the worst, as he defined them, but used completely irrational standards to grant clemency to despicable, hateful murderers. Women and immigrants deserve the same protection from predatory hatred as blacks and Jews. Biden should be ashamed of his double standards.