Denver’s top prosecutor has joined a group of state-level prosecutors, law enforcement officials and former U.S. attorneys asking President Donald Trump to commute death sentences of several people scheduled for federal execution in the next two months.

Their joint statement also asks for an immediate end to the federal death penalty, saying the penalty’s application is racist and “rushing” to carry out executions in a pandemic during the waning days of Trump’s presidency would undermine public trust in the American legal system. 

“Fundamentally, I do not believe the government should be in the business of executing people and call on the federal government to follow Colorado’s lead on this issue by halting these five executions and commuting the sentences to life in prison,” said Denver DA Beth McCann in a news release Thursday.

“The death penalty is unnecessary to protect public safety, costly, arbitrary and tinged with racial bias.”

Others who joined the statement calling to end the death penalty federally include 60 current elected prosecutors, nine former U.S. attorneys and 14 current and former sheriffs and police chiefs, according to the release. The release says it is a bipartisan group.

Colorado’s legislature abolished capital punishment this year. Although the new law does not apply retroactively to people already sentenced to death, following its passage Gov. Jared Polis commuted the sentences of the three inmates on Colorado’s death row. 

According to a database of scheduled executions, five inmates on federal death row are scheduled to have their sentences carried out through January 2021. Four are Black men — Brandon Bernard, Alfred Bourgeois, Cory Johnson and Dustin Higgs. The fifth is a white woman named Lisa Montgomery. 

The inmates’ scheduled executions have brought public controversy. For example, five jurors who voted to convict Bernard, along with prosecutor Angela Moore who won against the appeal to have his conviction and sentence overturned, have now called for Bernard’s clemency, CBS has reported. They have said the death sentence — scheduled to be carried out next Thursday — is too harsh for his involvement at 18 years old in a carjacking that ended with a double murder. 

And attorneys for Bourgeois, who is scheduled for execution Dec. 11,  have argued he is intellectually disabled and should be ineligible for execution. 

The Justice Department carried out the first federal execution in July, of Daniel Lewis Lee, after a 17-year moratorium. 

“We also now know that we have not executed the worst of the worst, but often instead put to death the unluckiest of the unlucky – the impoverished, the poorly represented, and the most broken,” says the joint statement of law enforcement and prosecutors.

According to the statement, people of color have accounted for 43% of U.S. executions since 1976 and 55% of inmates currently on death row are people of color. 

“Race also plays a deeply disturbing and unacceptable role in the application of the death penalty. Studies have documented that defendants of color are disproportionately likely to be sentenced to die – this is particularly and uniquely true when the victim is white.”