There were many things that I hated about the Trump administration but one of the most gratuitously revolting things was how in its last days, we had the grotesque spectacle of Trump and his attorney general Bill Barr rushing through the executions of people on federal death row. There was absolutely no reason for this killing spree except that with Joe Biden being against the death penalty, Trump and Barr mush have feared that those people might be reprieved once Biden came into office. Trump and Barr did not want to give them any chance of life. It was truly sickening. One should never take away someone’s life. To rush to do so when you did not have to reveals the existence of a deeply disturbed mentality.
But one result of that Trump-Barr death desire was that it has rejuvenated the anti-death penalty movement, starting at the federal level. As Liliana Segura writes:
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, presidential election, and right-wing insurrection, Trump’s execution spree ended much like it began, with three killings carried out back-to-back over the course of one week. In all, 13 people died in the federal death chamber between July 2020 and January 2021. If not for the abrupt departure of Attorney General William Barr and a major Covid-19 outbreak on federal death row in December, the number may well have been even higher.
Although it took some time for Americans to start paying attention, the killings revitalized the fight against the death penalty in the United States. Many of the executions were emblematic of capital punishment’s enduring unfairness, and the final three were no exception. Lisa Montgomery, the only woman under a federal death sentence, had lived a life marked by extreme trauma and mental illness. Johnson was killed despite a Supreme Court ban on executing people with intellectual disabilities. And Dustin Higgs, the last man to die, was executed for three murders carried out by another man, who had since said that the government’s case was “bullshit.” All of the last six men killed were Black.
Many groups are joining together in the movement to abolish the death penalty.
A coalition of leading US civil and human rights groups is calling on Joe Biden immediately to commute the sentences of all 49 federal death row inmates and reinstate a moratorium on executions carried out by the US government.
Led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and joined by 82 major organisations including the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International, the coalition has written to the president, urging him to put an end to the federal death penalty.
The plea follows a similar urging from Democrats in Congress and comes after an unprecedented killing spree that marked the bloody end of Donald Trump’s presidency.
…Until Trump revived the practice, the US government had played a relatively minor role in capital punishment, leaving the bulk of the blood-letting to individual states. But last year, after a 17-year hiatus, federal executions restarted.
Most of the people facing the death penalty in the US do so in state courts and are covered by state laws. Colorado abolished the death penalty last year and it is encouraging that Virginia is poised to become the 23rd state to abolish it. More significantly, it is the first southern state to do so.
Virginia has been the national leader in carrying out executions for more than 400 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Nearly 1,400 people have been killed by the government in Virginia, according to a count by the organization.
Republican states are more likely than not to have the death penalty while Democratic states have mostly abolished it as can be seen in these comparison maps.
Death penalty map:
2020 presidential election map:
Bucking that pattern, three Democratic states, California, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, still have the death penalty on their books but at least have moratoriums on it imposed by their governors. On the other side, Republican Alaska has not had the the death penalty since 1957 and North Dakota has not had it since 1973. Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia have recently tended to vote Democratic but still have the death penalty. They may be the next in line to abolish it.
It’s at best not clear how committed Biden really is to that. If he’s radically changed his position late in life, great, but what if it’s just some talk to get votes?
Also, my impression was that (at best) we’re talking about getting rid of the death penalty for federal cases, which is not the same as abolishing it throughout the country. The plan of “incentivizing” states to follow the federal government’s lead is a load of bullshit, which I expect to either do nothing substantive, or more likely to cut funding for desperately-needed welfare programs or some neoliberal crap like that.
And of course, his infamous crime bill allowed the death penalty to be applied for lots of new offenses. It’s not as if Biden’s merely been going with the flow, staying sort of quiet about it, or riding the fence, like some others have. If we’re looking at his record and not just some words spoken on the campaign trail, he has got to be one of the least plausible candidates among all Democrats to be serious about ending the death penalty.
So I’ll believe it when I see it. Maybe that is what Trump and Barr and their ilk were paranoid about, but I don’t actually need to put my tinfoil hat on just because that’s what they’re wearing. For now, I’m saving mine for another occasion.
An awfully messy “pattern.” even if you’re really hoping for a pattern.
You didn’t mention how IA and WV are also exceptions. Arguably, the second districts of ME and NE don’t fit either.
Also, it apparently doesn’t mean much to brand them as “Democratic states,” with examples like AZ, GA, MI, PA, WI, which voted the other way in the previous election — hardly ancient history. And any of them could easily flip again to the R in a presidential race in the future. And it’s just a presidential race, which doesn’t actually capture the entire political culture of a state, even if it were fairly consistent from one election to the next…..
Anyway, if around 40% or so of the things in the supposed pattern don’t fit, you must acquit. That’s pretty much the argument. These are silly categories to use. I don’t live in a “Republican state.” It’s just a state. It’s voted for Democratic presidents in the past, like every other state has in your lifetime, and it probably will again. This way of talking also encourages laziness or helplessness among Dems, to think they should disregard such places or leave them to their own devices, because it’s “not our turf.”
The UK abolished the death penalty in 1998 (not a typo), but now we’ve left the EU I worry that the loony right might bring it back. I certainly wouldn’t put it past Alexander Johnson, and I can see Ugly Patel welcoming it with open arms.
Canada effectively hasn’t had the death penalty since 1963 (the last executions were in 1962, and the government that took power in 1963 made it a matter of policy to commute death sentences); officially the death penalty was banned for civilian offences in 1976, though it took until 1999 for it to be banned within the military as well (military justice being under a different set of laws than civilian).
Popular support for the death penalty is apparently about 50/50, but no major party is interested in bringing up anything that contentious right now.
Barr and Trump are sadists. They don’t need reasons other than that they like to make people suffer.
sonofrojblake had only 4 offences that qualified for the death penalty in 1998. These were High Treason, Piracy with Violence, arson in Royal Dockyards and espionage. Nine if which have been used since the death penalty for everything else was abolished in 1965. So in effect in the UK the death penalty disappeared in 1965 and 1973 for Northern Ireland. The 1965 abolition was temporary but made permanent in 1969.
Edit -- The UK missing from first sentence
What Marcus said. It wasn’t meat for the base or a political statement or anything else, it was that being legally allowed to kill people, ESPECIALLY black people, makes Trump and Barr tingle in their secret places.
Biden should be doing what Cheetolini did. Use the impeachment as a distraction and commute all the sentences to life. In eighteen months when the next round of elections comes, nobody will care because it won’t have any effect on public safety.
jenorafeuer (#3) --
The pro-state murder types north of the border are no different than those south of it: they’re dishonest and bloodthirsty. They only want to talk about Williams, Pickton, and Olson, and intentionally avoid mentioning Milgaard, Marshall and Morin. Why admit your argument is fatally flawed?
@Intransitive:
Oh, I’m aware of that. When this came up during the Mulroney years, most of the Progressive Conservative party members supported bringing it back, while Mulroney himself as the head of the party opposed it. Given that Mulroney had all the ethics of a sleazy used car salesman, I figure he opposed it mostly due to figuring the backlash from that would be too much to handle. It’s kind of like the abortion issue up here; there’s way more popular support than there should be for the regressive side of things due to people getting whipped up into it, but generally the higher-ranking politicians treat it as a ‘third rail’ in election politics.
Considering the Reform Party did have reinstating capital punishment as part of their platform, and the modern Conservative party is more the Reform Party than the older Progressive Conservative party in many ways, we have no reason to allow ourselves relax on this case, of course.
Honestly, the worst part of Canadian politics is just how much U.S. political talk becomes part of our discussion as well. There are far too many Canadians who look at the near-fascism in the U.S. and think that makes for a great role model.
I go along with Marcus and add that it fed Trump’s ego that he had the power to kill people.
Covid had a hand in saving their lives. I guess as soon as there is a risk of their own staff dying, the ‘justice’ staff felt like easing up.