Five federal executions are scheduled during the waning weeks of President Donald Trump’s time in office — potentially breaking a long-standing norm not to carry out federal death sentences during a lame-duck period.
The U.S. Department of Justice has authorized eight federal executions since July, the Associated Press reports. In July 2019, Attorney General William Barr announced the DOJ would resume capital punishment after a nearly 20-year pause in federal executions.
The first of the five to be carried out before Trump leaves office is scheduled for Tuesday, and two are scheduled within the week before President-elect Joe Biden’s Jan. 20, 2021, inauguration.
‘Inconsistent with American norms’
If all five are carried out, Trump’s administration will have authorized 13 federal executions in six months.
That would be the most federal executions in a year since 1896, when former President Grover Cleveland’s administration carried out 16, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that tracks death penalty cases across the U.S.
It would also mark the first time in roughly 132 years that the U.S. government went through with an execution during a president’s lame-duck period.
The last time was in January 1889, when Cleveland executed Richard Smith, who was a Choctaw Indian, for a “murder on tribal land in Arkansas,” the DPIC says.
“This is another part of the Trump legacy that’s inconsistent with American norms,” Robert Dunham, the executive director of the DPIC, told The New York Times. “If the administration followed the normal rules of civility that have been followed throughout the history in this country, it wouldn’t be an issue. The executions wouldn’t go forward.”
Dunham told the Times it’s standard for a president to defer to the new administration’s death penalty stance.
Biden’s stance
The president-elect supports eliminating the death penalty.
“Because we cannot ensure we get death penalty cases right every time, Biden will work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example,” his campaign website says.
The site points to those who have been exonerated after being sentenced to death.
Since 1973, 172 people sentenced to death were later found to have been wrongly convicted, DPIC says.
“The system that determines whether someone lives or dies is broken — and innocent people have been sentenced to death,” Lisa Cylar Barrett, director of Policy at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, said in a statement following Barr’s 2019 announcement. “After many years of not carrying out this most egregious form of punishment, we must ask why the government is moving forward with this action now and in such a rushed manner.”
People of color are disproportionately executed, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Of the 54 people currently on death row, 24 are Black, 22 are white and 7 are Latino, according to the DPIC. And of the 172 people sentenced to death who were wrongly convicted, 90 were Black, 64 white and 15 Latino.
Four of the five people set to be executed before Biden takes office are Black.
“It’s hard to understand why anybody at this stage of a presidency feels compelled to kill this many people … especially when the American public voted for someone else to replace you and that person has said he opposes the death penalty,” Dunham told the Associated Press. “This is a complete historical aberration.”
Policy changes
Before this year, federal executions were “extremely rare,” CNN reports.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in the 1970s. But in 1994, the Federal Death Penalty Act limited federal executions to “homicide offenses, espionage and treason and non-homicidal narcotics offense.”
The eight executions since July have been carried out despite lawsuits, requests for clemency or commutation and appeals to the Supreme Court, according to CNN.
A group of 90 current and former law enforcement officials last week called on Trump to halt the five executions scheduled for before Biden takes office.
But Barr has defended the plans, saying he’ll likely schedule more before leaving the Justice Department.
“I think the way to stop the death penalty is to repeal the death penalty,” Barr told the AP. “But if you ask juries to impose and juries impose it, then it should be carried out.”
The Trump administration has also rushed to make policy changes that would allow the federal government more options to administer capital punishment, including firing squads and electrocution, ProPublica reports.
Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, told the Times the change is “symbolic” and that the Biden administration could reverse it.
“It’s a pretty gruesome way to go out,” Vladeck said, according to the Times. “This is basically the attorney general doubling down on, you know, sort of making it possible to execute as many federal prisoners as he can before his tenure is over.”
This story was originally published December 07, 2020 1:05 PM.
