Resumed federal executions raise death penalty’s 2020 stakes

WASHINGTON >> The question to Michael Dukakis, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1988, was brutally personal.

“If Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?” Bernard Shaw, a CNN anchor, asked, referring to the Massachusetts governor’s wife. Dukakis said he wouldn’t favor it because “I don’t see any evidence that it is a deterrent.”

The technocratic, largely emotionless response in a debate mere weeks before the election marked the nadir of Democrats’ politically agonized relationship to the death penalty — reinforcing in some voters’ minds that the party was soft on crime. President George H.W. Bush went on to crush Dukakis, winning the Electoral College vote, 426-111.

Four years later, then Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton projected the opposite message, defending the death penalty on a New Hampshire debate stage, then leaving the campaign trail to return to his home state and preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally impaired black inmate who killed a police officer and another man.

In the decade that followed, though, many Democrats were moved by the startling revelations of inmates being wrongly executed and began to rethink their position on capital punishment. In 2014, an Oklahoma execution was problematic enough that President Barack Obama mulled a moratorium on the federal death penalty. Though that never materialized, his party’s national platform endorsed one two years later, and only one of the 24 Democrats seeking the White House in 2020, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, has publicly supported preserving capital punishment in some form.

The issue took on unexpected urgency on Thursday when the Justice Department announced that it will begin executing federal death row inmates for the first time since 2003, again raising the political stakes on a topic that’s rarely been a Democratic strength. And while the party is now much more unified in opposing it than a generation ago, the public is not, potentially casting a long policy shadow over the upcoming primary.

Democratic strategist Mike Lavigne said that, despite the planned federal executions, he doesn’t see the issue as a winner for Democrats because “there’s not a lot of single-issue voters on the death penalty.”

Still, several Democratic presidential candidates strongly criticized the move, setting up a stark contrast with President Donald Trump.

“Capital punishment is immoral and deeply flawed,” Sen. Kamala Harris of California said on Twitter. “Too many innocent people have been put to death.”

About 6 in 10 Americans favor the death penalty, according to the General Social Survey, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. That’s declined steadily since the 1990s, when nearly three-quarters were in favor.

Even California, the nation’s largest blue state, rejected a capital punishment ban in 2016. Now-Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom used an executive order to declare a moratorium, but prosecutors in the state still sometimes seek the death penalty.

The first federal inmate is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 9, less than two months before the Democratic primary begins with the Iowa caucus, and four other prisoners are set to be put to death over the next six weeks.

Trump has repeatedly endorsed capital punishment for serious crimes, and that’s likely to play well with his conservative base heading into 2020. Republican support for capital punishment has held steady at about 8 in 10 over the past two decades, while about half of Democrats now say they favor it compared to nearly two-thirds in the 1990s.