US Elections: Donald Trump Refuses to Postpone Executions of Joe Biden

If Joe Biden has his way, the federal execution chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana will never be needed again.

The incoming president has made it clear that after his inauguration he will eliminate the death penalty for those sentenced to federal death and will encourage states that still apply capital punishment to do the same.

But Trump is still in power. And he is the first outgoing president in 100 years to reject the “normal rules of civility” that dictate that all executions cease after Election Day.

It means that he will add two more names to the list of Americans executed under his supervision since he resumed executions on death row after a 17-year hiatus in July.

It’s a starting blow for Biden from the Trump campaign, one that experts say is a deliberate abuse of procedure followed by previous occupants of the Oval Office.

“This is another part of Trump’s legacy that is inconsistent with American standards,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Center for Information on the Death Penalty.

He told the New York Times: “If the administration followed the normal rules of civility that have been followed throughout history in this country, it would not be a problem. The executions would not go ahead.”

As Time reports, the Trump administration’s final executions will be the first under a “pathetic” president in more than 100 years.

When Orlando Hall was executed on Friday, he became the eighth person to be executed since July and the first since Trump lost the US election.

Hall, who kidnapped, raped and buried alive a 16-year-old girl, received a cocktail of drugs for the execution. He told his followers through the glass window of the execution chamber: “I’m fine” and “Tell my children that I love them.”

The execution of the 49-year-old was carried out despite a last-minute legal challenge in the Supreme Court.

Next in line are Brandon Bernard, 40, and Lisa Montgomery, 51. Bernard and his accomplices brutally murdered two youth ministers, Todd and Stacie Bagley, on a military reservation in 1999, according to the US Department of Justice. United States.

The assailants kidnapped the couple, put them in the trunk of a car at gunpoint, and parked it on the Fort Hood military reservation, where they doused it with lighter fluid and set it on fire.

Meanwhile, Montgomery stalked and killed a pregnant woman before ripping her baby out of the womb. He killed Bobbie Jo Stinnett in 2004 before stealing Stinnett’s baby and claiming it as his own.

She called her friends and family to break the news that she had given birth to a baby and that she ran errands the next day. Police knocked on her door the day after the crime and found her holding the baby on the couch.

If the executions go as expected, Bernard and Montgomery could end up being the last two prisoners to be executed in Terre Haute.

Robert Owen, an attorney representing Bernard, said the last two federal prisoners executed under Trump were “essentially randomly selected criminals.”

He told the Times it was “an arbitrary and unjust tragedy” to carry out the executions after the Americans voted for Biden.

“How can we be killing people between now and January?”

“Those people are in effect trapped in a whirlpool of history. They are being swirled in a whirlpool that does not represent the mainstream of American political opinion and social judgment on the death penalty.”

Montgomery could still escape the gruesome fate on a technicality.

As widely reported over the weekend, his lawyers became infected with Covid-19 and have successfully arranged for the execution to move from December 8 to December 31.

If executed, she will be the first woman to be executed by the federal government in 67 years.

Lawyers and advocates are working hard behind the scenes to have his death sentence commuted or his execution delayed until Biden is in power.

More than 1,000 advocates have signed letters urging Trump to replace the death sentence with life in prison without parole.