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Donald Trump isn’t just sparking fury among opponents in his career by completing a string of federal executions in his final weeks in office. It is also running in the opposite direction from the US states, which increasingly reject the death penalty, as does the American public.
While most US states maintain the death penalty, and the majority of the public still supports it, the number of prisoners killed and public support for executions continues to decline, while the number of states resigning. to the pain increases. , Quick.
Ngozi Ndulue, senior director of research and special projects at the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) in Washington, DC, described the hasty series of Trump administration executions since the summer as “a spree” that is “impressive.” .
“The federal government has proven to be out of step with the states and out of step with history,” he told The Guardian.
More Americans now oppose the death penalty than at any time in more than half a century, according to a Gallup poll released last month. Most Americans still support the executions of criminals convicted of murder, but the proportion, 55 percent, is at its lowest point since 1972, when 50 percent said they supported the practice.
But the president and his attorney general, Bill Barr, revived federal executions last summer, after they had basically been on hold for 17 years, and are now taking prisoners to the execution chamber.
“We have to recover the death penalty. They have to pay the maximum price. They cannot do this. They cannot do this to our country, ”said Donald Trump.
Five executions were scheduled between last Thursday and Trump’s departure from the White House on January 20, bringing a total of 13 federal executions since July and cementing Trump’s legacy as the most prolific executing president in more than 130 years.
Second man in two days
On Friday, the Trump administration killed the second man in two days.
“I think the way to stop the death penalty is to revoke the death penalty,” Barr said. “But if you ask the jurors to impose and the jurors impose it, then it must be done.”
In the last ten years, ten states have abolished the death penalty or declared a moratorium on executions.
“The death penalty cannot be administered equitably, and never has been, in the state of Colorado,” Governor Jared Polis said after banning capital punishment in the state in March.
Colorado’s move followed similar action in New Hampshire in 2019, Washington state in 2018 and, also since 2010, Delaware, Maryland, Connecticut and Illinois, while the governors of California, Pennsylvania and Oregon declared a moratorium on the executions, in a series of actions that mean a total of 22 states and the District of Columbia now avoid the death penalty.
Next year, the Virginia legislature will consider legislation to repeal it there.
If that happens, it would mark a dramatic transformation for Virginia, moving forward from what the Washington Post called the “dubious honor of the state as the nation’s first and deadliest executioner.”
An official shooting for treason was recorded in the Jamestown colony in 1608 and since then it has officially executed more of its citizens than states like Texas, Oklahoma and Florida which have been far more prolific executioners in the modern era.
Meanwhile, states that have the death penalty use it less.
Texas, which has been the overwhelming modern powerhouse of American executions, has sentenced three prisoners to death this year. At its peak, the state executed 40 people in 2000.
In its 2019 annual report, the DPIC said 22 prisoners were killed in just seven states that year, a dramatic decline from the peak of 98 executions in 1999 and the lowest number since 20 were executed three years earlier.
There were three federal executions between 1988 and 2019, a period that spans both the Republican and Democratic administrations.
“There is no precedent in the 20th or 21st centuries” for either the volume of federal executions this year or the persistence in a period of transition from one president to another, Ms. Ndulue said.
And of the 25 states that maintain capital punishment, Ms. Ndulue said that “less than 2% of jurisdictions are responsible for more than half of death sentences and executions” in the modern era. About a dozen states that pass the death penalty have not executed anyone in at least a decade.
There are many factors that encourage states to leave capital punishment for the past.
Expensive
States that abolished the death penalty in the 21st century have not seen a corresponding increase in killings. And throughout a case, capital punishment is more expensive, in dollars, than life imprisonment.
The federal death penalty has also long been disproportionately used against people of color. Murders in which the victim was white are much more likely to involve execution, according to the DPIC.
“The way the death penalty is assigned in the United States is inseparable from our legacy of racial injustice,” said Ms. Ndulue.
And the risks of killing innocents are serious.
The DPIC cites exonerations that have happened to people even after decades on death row.
In recent years, failed lethal injections in various venues and fierce disputes over the ethics of supplying the chemicals used in cocktails for such executions, and the shortages of the chemicals, have contributed to eroding public support.
Lastly, the spate of federal executions in 2020, which brings meetings of officials, families, lawyers and the media, has already increased the spread of the coronavirus. And four of the five people on the list of executions in December and January are African-American in a year of national protest over systemic racism.
MS Ndulue called it an “execution at all costs” strategy by Trump that she found, in a word, “astonishing.” – Guardian
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