During his campaign, newly elected President Donald Trump signaled that he would resume federal executions if he won, and that more people would be eligible for the death penalty, including child molesters, migrants who kill U.S. citizens and law enforcement officers, and those convicted for drug and human trafficking.
“These are terrible, terrible, terrible people who are responsible for death, carnage and crime across this country,” Trump said of human traffickers as he announced his 2024 candidacy. “We are going to ask anyone who sells drugs and is caught to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts,” he added.
While it remains unclear how Trump would move to expand the death penalty, anti-death penalty groups and criminal justice reform advocates say they take his claims seriously, pointing to the wave of federal executions that occurred during his first term.
“We are going to fight this tooth and nail, and we are going to try to uphold the constitutional principles that do not call for this expansion,” said Yasmin Cader, deputy legal director of the ACLU and director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality.
Thirteen federal inmates were put to death at the end of Trump’s first term — even as the pandemic prompted states to halt executions over Covid concerns in prisons. The cases included the first woman executed by the federal government in nearly 70 years; the youngest person by age at which the crime occurred (18 at the time of his arrest); and the only Native American on federal death row.
No president had overseen so many federal executions since Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century, and the U.S. government had not executed anyone in more than fifteen years until Trump revived the practice.
His then-attorney general, William Barr, had said the federal government “owed it to victims to carry out the punishment imposed by the justice system.”
Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
President Joe Biden had campaigned on passing legislation to abolish the death penalty at the federal level, but backtracked during his term in office. Instead, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a moratorium in 2021 to review federal execution protocols.
States that use the death penalty have had to postpone executions in recent years because they were unable to obtain the necessary lethal injection drugs. However, Alabama has found a new alternative – nitrogen gas – to put two prisoners to death this year.
Biden’s aides say he supports death row inmates serving life sentences without probation or parole. It is unclear what, if anything, he can do about this issue before he leaves office.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department under Biden and Garland has not sought the death penalty in federal cases that might warrant it, and has even rescinded the death penalty in about two dozen cases it inherited. Federal prosecutors can ask a death penalty panel at the department for permission to file capital assessments, but the attorney general ultimately signs off.
Forty inmates, all men, are currently on federal death row, according to the nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center. They include gunmen responsible for the mass shootings in South Carolina and Pittsburgh, and the man convicted in the Boston Marathon bombing.
Lee Kovarsky, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law and co-director of the school’s Capital Punishment Center, said Biden still has the ability to act before Trump takes office by commuting the sentences of the entire line of prisoners to lifelong. .
Justice will still be served, Kovarsky said, because “they can’t figure it out.”
More than forty federal laws provide for the death penalty, almost all of which involve murder or an illegal act resulting in death. Whether Trump would expect federal prosecutors to seek death in cases that don’t explicitly involve murder — for example, the rape of a child — remains to be seen, but the Death Penalty Information Center notes that a 2008 Supreme Court ruling execution of people convicted of raping children and says it is unclear whether the use of the federal death penalty would be constitutional in certain cases where someone was not murdered.
Kovarsky said Trump’s Justice Department could only prosecute a capital case if the crime is legally permissible and carries the death penalty. Otherwise, he would need Congress to change the law that allows this specific crime.
Furthermore, the number of executions cannot be immediately increased if he becomes president, Kovarsky added, given the logistics of signing a death warrant, ensuring drug protocol is available and the expected legal issues that would arise.
But Ruth Friedman, the director of the Federal Capital Habeas Project, which represents some death row inmates, said there is a real concern that the next Trump administration will quickly turn to the death penalty, even if no one is executed immediately. , it could start restoring the execution protocol.
“They will undo the changes [Biden’s] government has created,” Friedman said.
She added that the current makeup of the Supreme Court, with a six-to-three conservative majority, has already shown that it will generally support the death penalty — even in cases that have attracted attention for claims of innocence, misconduct and racist prejudices.
But Friedman said it’s possible lawmakers from both parties could speak out if they’re uncomfortable with the issue’s progress. She pointed to a death penalty case in Texas in which both Republican and Democratic lawmakers were successful last month in halting the execution of Robert Roberson over concerns about an outdated medical diagnosis that led to his death penalty in 2003.
Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, an independent research program, said Trump’s intention to execute child molesters in particular may appeal to his “tough on crime” supporters but is more nuanced. He said the National Registry of Exonerations, which tracks sentences resulting from wrongful convictions, has found that child victim cases pose special dangers of wrongful conviction because they can be “extremely emotional, often pitting family members against each other.” and often rely on false statements. forensic evidence.
Child sexual abuse cases are the second most common charges resulting in wrongful convictions without a crime, behind cases in which police planted drugs on suspects, the 2022 filing said.
“The justice system in itself is deeply traumatic for these vulnerable children, subjecting them to the psychological trauma of being part of a system that could kill their caregiver and also subjecting them to the trauma of having to testify, be interrogated and spend years having to spend time reliving the abuse during the appeals process – if this is any way to protect children,” Dunham said, “this is the wrong way to do it.”
Expanding the death penalty could only worsen existing racial disparities among federal prison inmates and also continue to disproportionately affect intellectually disabled defendants of color, Dunham added.
Given that, the ACLU’s Cader says, it will be imperative that all branches of government monitor Trump’s efforts to broaden the use of the death penalty when its constitutionality is questioned.
“What we know is that he has already shown us that he will act on these promises,” she said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
