Trump ratchets up pace of executions before inauguration
As Donald CHICAGO —
Trump’s presidency winds down, his administration is ratcheting up the pace of federal executions despite a surge of coronavirus cases in prisons, announcing plans forfive startingThursdayand concluding just days before the Jan. 20 inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.
If thefive gooffasplanned, it will make 13 executions since Julywhen the Republican administration resumed putting inmates to death after a 17-year hiatus and will cement Trump’s legacy as the most prolific execution president in over 130 years. He’ll leave office having executed about a quarter of all federal death-row prisoners, despite waning support for capital punishment among both Democrats and Republicans.
In a recent interviewwith The Associated Press, Attorney General William Barr defended the extension of executions intothe post-election period, saying he’ll likely schedule more before he departs the Justice Department. A Biden administration, he said, should keep it up.
“I think the way to stop the death penalty is to repeal the death penalty,” Barr said. “But if you ask juries to impose and juries impose it, then it should be carried out.”
The plan breaks a tradition of lame-duck presidents deferring to incoming presidents on policy aboutwhich they differ so starkly, said Robert Dunham, director of the non-partisan Death Penalty Information Center. Biden, a Democrat, is a death penalty foe, and his
spokesman told the AP that he’d work to end the death penaltywhen he is in office.
“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,” Dunhamsaid. “This is acomplete historical aberration.”
Not since thewaning days of Grover Cleveland’s presidency in the late 1800s has the U.S. government executed federal inmates during a presidential transition, Dunham said. Cleveland’s was also the last presidency during which the number of civilians executed federallywas in the double digits in a year, with 14 executed in 1896.
Anti-death penalty groups want Biden to lobby harder for a halt to the flurry of pre-inaugural executions, though Biden can’t domuch to stop them, especially considering Trump won’t even concede he lost the election and is spreading baseless claims of voting fraud.
The issue is an uncomfortable one for Biden given
his past support for capital punishment and his central role crafting a 1994 crime bill that added 60 federal crimes for which someone could be put to death.
Activists say the bill, which Biden has since agreed was flawed, puts added pressure on him to act.
“He is acknowledging the sins” of the past, said Abraham Bonowitz, Death Penalty Action’s director. “Now he’s got to fix it.”
Several inmates already executed on death rowwere convicted under provisions of that bill, including ones thatmade kidnappings and carjackings resulting in death federal capital offenses.
The race of those set to die buttresses criticismthat the bill disproportionately impactedBlack people. Four of the five set to die over the next few weeks are Black. The fifth, Lisa Montgomery, is white. Convicted of killing a pregnant woman and cutting out the baby alive, sheis the only femaleof the 61 inmateswhowere on death rowwhen executions resumed, and shewould be the first woman to be executed federally in nearly six decades.
The executions so far this year have been by lethal injection at a U.S. penitentiary inTerreHaute, Indiana, where all federal executions take place. The drug used to carry out the sentences is sparse. The Justice Department recently updated protocols to allow for executions by firing squadand poison gas, though it’s unclear if those methods might be used in coming weeks.
The concern about moving forward with executions in the middle of a pandemic — as the Bureau of Prisons struggles with an exploding number of virus cases at prisons across the country — heightened further on Monday when the Justice Department disclosed that some members of the execution team had tested positive for the virus.
The disclosurewas made in a court filing by lawyers for two inmates at the prison complex, saying the Justice Department informed them that some of the members of the team — among the nearly 100 people are typically brought in to assist in various tasks during each execution — had tested positive for coronavirus after the last execution.
Barr suddenly announced in July 2019 that executions would resume, though there had been no public clamor for it. Several lawsuits kept the initial batch from being carried out, and by the time the Bureau of Prisons got clearance theCOVID-19 pandemic was in full swing.