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There are 22 US states that do not have capital punishment and of the 28 that provide for it, 12 have not applied it for 10 years. This year, there have only been executions in five states: a total of eight convicts killed; The downward trend in executions has been evident in the United States since the 1990s. But the Trump administration decided, in its final year, to resume federal executions, which had not occurred since 2003. And it did so with such enthusiasm that in the week of July, when he ordered his first federal execution, he marked two more; Right there, it equaled the number of federal executions in the past three decades. Two more in August, two more in September; after the elections, on November 19, one more, and on December two.
It adds up to ten, that is, more than 21% of all federal executions since the 1920s, for a total of 47. And they make 2020 the first year in the history of the country where there were more federal executions than of all the states together. .
But Trump does not intend to stop here: There are three more federal executions scheduled for 2021, including the first of a woman since 1953. It concerns Lisa Montgomery, 52, convicted in 2004. for the murder of an eight-month pregnant woman who subsequently removed the baby from the womb with a knife (the child survived). Montgomery is the only woman on federal death row (there are 50 women on death row in 15 states), with 61 men. His execution was scheduled for December 8 and was postponed to January 12, eight days after Biden’s inauguration.
Since 1889, an outgoing president has not had anyone assassinated during the transition period, in what the United States calls the president. “disabled“, that is,” lame duck “. The last president to order executions like a lame duck was Grover Cleveland, in 1889, and it was also Cleveland, in his second term (he is the only one in the history of the United States that had two non-consecutive terms, having been the 22 and the 24 President), setting the record for federal executions: 16. If he kills all 13 he has planned, Trump will be second in this category.
Executions have been on the decline since the 1990s
Federal executions are the result, as the name implies, of federal court decisions, which can sentence to death for murder or attempted murder of witnesses, jurors or members of the courts, but also treason, espionage and even drug trafficking , among others. other crimes. Contrary to what occurs in state courts, where each prosecutor has the autonomy to request the death penalty, in the federal system only the United States Attorney General (the correspondent for the Portuguese Attorney General but also the Minister of Justice) can request capital punishment. Convicted persons can only appeal to federal courts.
But despite the murderous fury of the Trump administration, and there are still about 2,600 people on death row in the United States since 1991, few people have been executed in a year. After a peak of 98 executions in 1999, the number has been notably lower. And the state of California, which has the highest number of people sentenced to capital punishment, 720, has not done so since 2006.
“The country has evolved since the 1990s, when executions and death sentences peaked,” he says, quoted by New York Times, Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, whose December report, which presents various figures on this reality, draws attention to the records set by Trump in 2020 and the contrast with what appears to be the leadership of the country.
According to Dunham, the reasons for the growing resistance to the death penalty are numerous: moral opposition; the possibility of executing innocents; the high cost of litigation in capital cases; the fact that it is not a deterrent; the belief that “everything that is wrong in the penal system is made worse in the case of capital punishment. People do not trust the justice of the system.”
And with reasons for that: this year, six more were sentenced to death completely released – now 172 since 1973. All six had spent between 14 and 37 years in prison, and in all cases the prosecution was found to be misbehaving.
There is also the cost-benefit calculation, as Dunham certifies to the Washington Post: During the post-2008 recession, conservative lawmakers subjected the death penalty to a cost-benefit analysis similar to that used for social programs and found it to be ineffective.
Biden was in favor of the death penalty, now he’s against
2020 was also the year Colorado joined the 21 states without the death penalty. It happened in March, when Democratic Gov. Jared Polis declared that “the death penalty was never administered equitably, and will never be administered in Colorado “, drawing attention to figures that he considers to show racial inequality in the judicial system: seven of the 17 people executed this year were black, Latino or indigenous; 13 of the victims were white.
According to the aforementioned report from the Center for Information on the Death Penalty, in the November elections prosecutors from Los Angeles, Orlando, New Orleans, Tucson, Portland and Austin – cities in states where the death penalty exists – were elected. they promised not to ask for capital punishment.
And there is, of course, the new president. If Biden authored legislation in the 1990s that strengthened the possibility of the federal death penalty and restricted federal inmates on death row access to federal courts and hypothesized to allege the unconstitutionality of the sentences, he now appears to have served 180 years. degrees.
In his campaign, the president-elect defended the end of the federal death penalty, announcing that he wants to pass a law to end it, and “encourage the states to follow the example of the federal government … because we cannot guarantee that the death is always right. “
But Dunham emphasizes that Biden bears responsibility for Trump’s assassination: Legislation the now-elected president passed in the 1990s expanded crimes that could lead to the death penalty and helped make these latest executions possible. “At one point, Biden believed that capital punishment was a deterrent and that expanding its application would help fight crime,” says Dunham. “But 30 years later, it has proven to be endless. Joe Biden was always in the mainstream of the Democratic Party and his ideas in the 1990s were the main ideas of the party. The dynamic was completely different now.”
But can Biden end the federal death penalty? You need Congress for that, and with such a divided chamber, it’s not obvious that you can do it. Dunham believes that the solution may involve the use of his clemency power, commuting the death sentences. “If your goal is to end the death penalty and you can’t do it because legislators don’t even want to hear it, then you have no choice if you are really committed to what you say: you have to exercise your clemency.”
