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Christopher Vialva was executed this morning in the United States. It was the seventh death sentence in just over two months, a record for the Donald Trump administration.
In the 56 years since President John F. Kennedy, the United States federal court has executed three prisoners. In the past two and a half months, the Trump administration has imposed the death penalty on seven inmates on death row.
Christopher Vialva, 40, was the seventh convicted in execution since the US Supreme Court (STJ) approved, in July, the restitution of federal executions, suspended since 2003, when Republican Georg W was also president. Bush.
Among those who were executed under George W. Bush, Timothy McVeigh, the author of the Oklahoma attacks, in which 168 people died and at least 680 were injured. He was killed by injection on June 11, 2001.
The death penalty was applied to two more condemned during the presidency of Bush’s son: Juan Raúl Garza, on June 19, 2001, convicted of a consummate murder and as the principal of at least two more, as the leader of a cartel of the drug. and Louis Jones Jr., for the kidnapping and death of a female soldier, Tracie McBride.
About 20 years after this execution, the US government resumed the execution program in July, days after a strict decision by the US STJ, by five votes to four, at the request of the Washington Department of Justice. .
The day after the approval of the US STJ, executions began at Terre Haute Prison in Indiana, with the death penalty for three convicts in four days, between July 14 and 17.
“They are killing an innocent”
The first prisoner to be executed was Daniel Lee Lewis, an American supremacist convicted of the deaths of a couple and their daughter on January 11 in Arkansas. “It wasn’t me. I made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I’m not a killer,” said Daniel Lee, when asked if he wanted to say a few words. “They are killing an innocent.”
Two days later, on July 16, Wesley Ira Purkey, 68, was executed, convicted of the kidnapping, rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl in 1998. Dustin Lee Honken followed him the next day. He was 52 years old and had been convicted of killing five people in 1993 in an attempt to hide the methamphetamine business.
In August, Terre Haute gave the lethal injection to two more prisoners. Lezmond Charles Mitchell was executed on August 26, convicted of the death of Alyce Slim, 63, and her granddaughter, Tiffany Lee, in 2001. Two days later, Keith Dwayne Nelson, 45, was convicted of Pamela’s death. Butler. , 10 years old, in 1999.
Opponents of the death penalty accuse Donald Trump of retaking the practice to position himself as the candidate of law and order. Just over a month before the presidential elections, two more prisoners were executed in two days.
William Emmett LeCroy, 50, convicted of the 2001 kidnapping and murder of Joann Lee Tiesler, was executed on September 22. Two days later, Christopher Vialva followed, the seventh federal execution since July and the first for a black man in more than 17 years, since the death of Louis Jones Jr. in March 2018.
Five Caucasians executed to avoid black warfare
Five of the first six executions were of Caucasian prisoners, something critics say was premeditated to avoid protests and riots. The sixth was a Native American, a Navajo Indian.
Issues related to racial bias in the criminal and judicial system have been at the center of debate in the United States and street violence in recent months, following the death of George Floyd, an African American, while in police custody, having died from pressure exerted by the policeman’s knee on his neck, suffocating him.
A report released this month by the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization, revealed that blacks remain the majority of those sentenced to death and that blacks who kill whites are more subject to the penalty of death. death than whites. that kill blacks.
Of the 56 prisoners currently on death row, the organization revealed, 26 (almost 50%) are black; 22 (almost 40%) are Caucasian; 12% are Latino. There is still an Asian. Blacks represent only 13% of the prison population at the federal level.
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