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CHICAGO: As Donald Trump’s presidency ends, his administration is accelerating the pace of federal executions despite the surge in COVID-19 cases in prisons, announcing plans for five beginning Thursday (December 10) and concluding a few days before the inauguration of the president. – elect Joe Biden on January 20 of next year.
If all five go as planned, there will be 13 executions since July, when the Republican administration resumed executing prisoners after a 17-year hiatus and will cement Trump’s legacy as the most prolific executing president in nearly 130 years.
He will step down after executing about a quarter of all federal prisoners on death row, despite waning support for capital punishment among Democrats and Republicans.
In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Attorney General William Barr defended the extension of executions to the post-election period and said he will likely schedule more before leaving the Justice Department. A Biden administration, he said, should stay that way.
“I think the way to stop the death penalty is to revoke the death penalty,” Barr said. “But if you ask the jurors to enforce it and the juries enforce it, then it should be done.”
“HISTORICAL ABERRATION”
The plan breaks a tradition of lame presidents giving in to incoming presidents on policies about which they differ so markedly, said Robert Durham, director of the nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center.
Biden, a Democrat, is an enemy of the death penalty, and his spokesman told the AP that he would work to end the death penalty when he is in office.
“It’s hard to understand why someone at this stage of a presidency feels compelled to kill so many people … especially when the American public voted for someone else to replace them and that person has said they oppose the death penalty.” Durham said. “This is a complete historical aberration.”
Since the last days of Grover Cleveland’s presidency in the late 1800s, the United States government has not executed federal prisoners during a presidential transition, Durham said. Cleveland was also the last presidency during which the number of civilians executed at the federal level was in double digits in one year, with 14 executed in 1896.
Anti-death penalty groups want Biden to exert more pressure to stop the barrage of pre-inauguration executions, although Biden cannot do much to stop them, especially considering that Trump will not even admit he lost the election and is spreading unsubstantiated claims. of electoral fraud.
One, Ohio-based Death Penalty Action, has obtained some 3,000 signatures on a petition calling on Biden to make “a clear and forceful statement” demanding that the executions stop.
The problem is uncomfortable for Biden given his previous support for capital punishment and his central role in crafting a 1994 crimes bill that added 60 federal crimes for which someone could be sentenced to death.
Activists say the bill, which Biden has since agreed was flawed, puts pressure on him to act.
“He is acknowledging the sins” of the past, said Abraham Bonowitz, director of Death Penalty Action. “Now you have to fix it.”
Several inmates already executed on death row were convicted under the provisions of that bill, including some who committed kidnappings and vehicle thefts resulting in death for federal capital crimes.
The race of those who will die reinforces criticism that the bill disproportionately affected blacks.
Four of the five who are going to die in the next few weeks are black. The fifth, Lisa Montgomery, is white. Convicted of killing a pregnant woman and cutting off the baby’s life, she is the only woman of the 61 prisoners who were on death row when executions resumed, and she would be the first woman to be executed at the federal level in nearly seven decades.
UPDATED PROTOCOLS
The executions so far this year have been carried out by lethal injection in a US penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, where all federal executions take place. The drug used to carry out the sentences is scarce.
The Justice Department recently updated protocols to allow executions by firing squad and poison gas, though it’s unclear if those methods could be used in the coming weeks.
Barr suddenly announced in July 2019 that executions would resume, although there had been no public outcry for it. Several lawsuits prevented the initial batch from taking place, and when the Bureau of Prisons obtained clearance, the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing.
The virus has killed more than 282,000 people in the United States, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Critics have said that the restart of executions in an election year was politically motivated, helping Trump polish his claim that he is a law and order president.
The option of first executing a series of white men convicted of killing children also seemed calculated to make the executions more acceptable amid protests across the country over racial prejudice in the judicial system.
The first federal execution on July 14 was of Daniel Lewis Lee, convicted of killing an Arkansas family in a 1990s plot to build a white-only nation in the Pacific Northwest.
Barr has insisted that the reinstatement of federal executions was driven by law enforcement. He noted that under Democratic presidents, including Barack Obama, US authorities requested death sentences, they simply did not serve them.
“I don’t feel like it’s a political issue,” Barr told the AP.
COVID-19 CONCERNS
Trump has been a consistent supporter of the death penalty. In a 1990 Playboy interview, he described himself as a staunch supporter of capital punishment and said, “Either he will recover quickly or our society will rot.”
Thirty years later, not even the worsening pandemic has slowed his government’s determination to go ahead with executions, rejecting repeated calls to freeze policy until the pandemic eases.
Many states with death penalty laws have halted executions out of concern that the rampant spread of the coronavirus in prisons would put lawyers, witnesses and executioners at too great a risk.
Largely as a result of health precautions, states have executed just seven prisoners in the first half of the year and none since July. Last year, the states carried out a total of 22 executions.
The expectation is that Biden will end the Trump administration’s policy of carrying out executions as quickly as the law allows, although his long-term focus is unclear.
Durham said that while Obama imposed a moratorium on federal executions, he left the door open for future presidents to resume them. Obama, for whom Biden served as vice president, never employed the option of commuting all federal death sentences to life sentences.
As president, Biden could try to persuade Congress to abolish the federal death penalty or simply invoke his commutation powers to single-handedly convert all death sentences to life sentences.
“Biden has said that he intends to end the federal death penalty,” Durham said. “We will have to wait and see if that happens.”
