An ugly batch of executions, just before the bell
Living on death row is never a picnic, but the next five weeks are going to be a special kind of hell for three federal prisoners currently awaiting execution. Certainly, many Americans are looking forward to the end of the Trump administration, but none hope as anxiously to see the light of day on Jan. 20, 2021, as Lisa Montgomery, Cory Johnson and Dustin John Higgs.
The current spate of just-before-the-bell executions began this summer when the Trump administration resumed the use of capital punishment after a 17-year hiatus. Most recently, Brandon Bernard was executed on Dec. 10. Bernard was part of a gang that committed a brutal abduction and murder of two youth ministers in Texas in 1999.
Alfred Bourgeois was put to death the next day for torturing and beating his 2-year-old daughter to death in 2002. Montgomery is scheduled to die on Jan. 12, Johnson on Jan. 14 and Higgs on Jan. 15, just five days before Donald Trump leaves office.
The dates are relevant since president-elect Biden has said that he will work to end the federal death penalty. If Montgomery, Johnson and Higgs can find a way to delay their executions only a few more days, they will probably avoid the death penalty, which throws a particularly ironic and cruel cast on their predicaments.
At present their chances are slim. Trump is on course to oversee the most federal executions in more than a century. He is also violating a 130-year precedent of pausing federal executions during the transition between presidents. The last president to preside over an execution during a presidential transition was Grover Cleveland, in 1896.
In fact, Trump does not appear to believe that we are currently in a presidential transition, darkening the outlook for these inmates even more. And in the great scheme of things, their deaths are minor collateral damage compared to the harm inflicted on our republic during the last four years or the carnage wrought by a pandemic that is killing 3,000 people per day. Why worry about three more criminals when so many others are dying?
Still, their executions should be postponed.
Don’t misunderstand me: Although all five cases referenced here involve mitigating circumstances that call into question their legality and justice, I do not make any defense for these offenders. Their crimes were unspeakably cruel and ghastly. Society does not need these criminals and will probably be better off without them.
But we’ll never succeed at parsing out which horrible crimes deserve the death penalty and which do not, which helps explain why all western nations except the United States have abolished capital punishment. Instead we keep dubious company with death-penalty countries such as China, Iraq, Iran and Egypt.
There are many good arguments against the death penalty, but I do not make them here. I object, however, to the damage that the current rush to execute as many criminals as possible before Jan. 20 does to the elusive idea that justice in America is administered deliberatively and without consideration of external political motivations.
Trump’s motivations are always political, self-serving and often instinctually cruel. His psychology has little room for compassion, mercy or nuance, and his actions and rhetoric of the past five years have coarsened our already tough-minded attitudes toward criminals.
One avid Trump supporter told me that a country that practices capital punishment is going to occasionally execute innocent people, but “Nobody’s perfect.” Another asserts that anyone who dies from COVID while in prison — apparently for whatever crime — deserves his fate. It’s only a short step from that sort of unthinking cruelty to other indiscriminate miscarriages of justice.
Trump has five weeks to inflict in his official capacity his final injuries to our democratic institutions. Three hapless federal inmates condemned to fates that they probably more or less deserve won’t make much of a blip on his radar screen or on most of ours.
Nevertheless, Trump’s rush to execute simply because he can is a needlessly cruel misstep on the long, treacherous road from barbarity to even-handed, deliberate justice.