Throughout the campaign President-elect Donald Trump signaled that if he wins, he will continue federal executions and sentence more people to death, including child abusers, Migrants killing US citizens and law enforcement officers, drug and human trafficking convictions.
“These are horrible, horrible, horrible people who are responsible for death, carnage and crime across the country.” Trump said of human traffickers when announcing his 2024 candidacy. “We will ask anyone caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts,” he said.
While it’s unclear how Trump will move to expand the death penalty, anti-death penalty groups and criminal justice reform advocates are taking his claims seriously. capriciousness federal executions happened in his first period.
“We’re going to fight this tooth and nail and try to uphold constitutional principles that don’t call for this expansion,” said Yasmin Cader, the ACLU’s deputy legal director and director of the Trone Center. Justice and Equality.
13 federal inmates executed by end of Trump’s first term — even as pandemic causes states to halt executions Covid concerns in prisons. Cases included the first woman to be executed by the federal government for nearly 70 years; the the youngest person for his age when a crime is committed (18 when caught); and only Native American on federal death row.
No other president has ever overseen so many federal executions Ever since Grover Cleveland The US government had not executed anyone for more than 15 years, dating back to the late 1800s and until Trump reinstated the practice.
His attorney general at the time, William Barr, said the federal government “owes it to the victims to serve the sentence imposed by the justice system.”
Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
President Joe Biden campaigned on legislation to abolish the death penalty at the federal level, but withdrew from office. Instead, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a moratorium Reviewing federal enforcement protocols in 2021.
States that use the death penalty have had to postpone executions in recent years because they cannot afford the necessary lethal injection drugs. But Alabama found a new alternative—nitrogen gas—to put it Two prisoners died this year.
Biden’s aides say he supports death row inmates serving life sentences without parole or probation. It’s unclear what, if anything, he can do about the matter before he leaves office.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department, under Biden and Garland, has not sought the death penalty in federal cases that would have warranted it, and even reversed death penalty convictions in nearly two dozen cases it inherited. Federal prosecutors can ask the department’s death penalty committee for permission to file substantive charges, but the attorney general ultimately refuses.
There are currently 40 inmates on federal death row, all of them male, according to the report nonpartisan death penalty information center. They include the gunmen responsible for mass shootings in South Carolina and Pittsburgh and the man convicted of the Boston Marathon bombing.
Lee Kowarski, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law and co-director of the school’s Center on the Death Penalty, said Biden still has the ability to act before Trump takes office by commuting all inmate sentences to life in prison. .
Justice will still be served, Kowarski said, because “they’re not coming out.”
more than 40 federal law almost all provide for the death penalty for murder or an unlawful act resulting in death. It remains to be seen whether Trump can expect federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in cases that clearly do not involve murder — such as the rape of a child — but the Death Penalty Information Center notes that 2008 Supreme Court decision bans the execution of people convicted of child molestation and says it is unclear whether the federal death penalty would be constitutional in some cases where no one is killed.
Kovarsky said Trump’s Justice Department can only pursue capital cases where the crime is legally punishable by death. Otherwise, he would have to get Congress to change the law that authorizes this crime.
In addition, once he becomes president, speeding up executions again may not happen immediately, Kovarsky added, given the expected legal challenges that would arise from signing the death warrant, ensuring the existence of a drug protocol.
But Ruth Friedman, director of the Federal Capital Habeas Project, which represents some death row inmates, said the concern is real that the next Trump administration will move quickly to the death penalty, even if it doesn’t immediately execute someone. , it can start by restoring the execution protocol.
“They will reverse these changes [Biden’s] managed,” Friedman said.
He added that the current makeup of the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, has shown it will generally support the death penalty — even in high-profile cases. allegations of innocence, misconduct and racial bias.
But Friedman said lawmakers from both parties can speak up if they are concerned about how the issue is moving forward. He pointed to the death penalty case in Texas, where both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have won. Stay of execution of Robert Roberson Last month, over concerns about the outdated medical diagnosis that led to his 2003 capital trial.
Robert Dunham, director Draft Death Penalty Policy, an independent research program said Trump’s intention to execute child abusers in particular may appeal to his “tough on crime” supporters, but is more nuanced. According to him, the National Registry of Acquittals, which monitors verdicts issued as a result of illegal convictions, determined that cases of child victimization pose particular dangers for wrongful convictions because they “can be highly emotional, often pitting family members against each other” and often rely on false forensic evidence.
In 2022, the Register reported that child sexual abuse was the second most common charge resulting in wrongful convictions after police drug defendants.
“The legal system itself is very traumatic for these vulnerable children, subjecting them to the psychological trauma of being part of a system that can kill their caregiver, as well as the trauma of having to testify, be questioned and spend years. Reliving the abuse during the appeals process — if that’s the way to protect kids,” Dunham said, “it’s the wrong way to do it.”
Expanding the death penalty would make the existing one worse racial inequalities continues to disproportionately affect federal inmates mentally retarded Defendants of color, Dunham added.
Given that, the ACLU’s Cader said all branches of government would be forced to scrutinize Trump’s attempts to expand the death penalty if constitutionality is called into question.
“What we do know is that he has already shown us that he will keep those promises,” he said.