Hope of executions’ swift end dies
Biden’s silence on issue since elected worries activists
CHICAGO — Activists widely expected Joe Biden to take swift action against the death penalty as the first sitting president to oppose capital punishment, especially since an unprecedented spate of executions by his predecessor ended just days before Biden took office.
Instead, the White House has been mostly silent.
Biden hasn’t said whether he’d back a bill introduced by fellow Democrats to strike the death penalty from U.S. statutes. He also hasn’t rescinded Trump-era protocols enabling federal executions to resume and allowing prisons to use firing squads if necessary, something many thought he’d do on day one.
And his administration recently asked the Supreme Court to reinstate the Boston Marathon bomber’s original death sentence.
The hands-off approach is adding to disarray around the death penalty nationwide as pressure increases in some conservative states to find ways to continue executions amid shortages of the lethal-injection drugs. Some longtime death penalty observers say Biden’s silence risks sending a message that he’s OK with states adopting alternative execution methods.
“Biden’s lack of action is unconscionable,” said Ashley Kincaid Eve, a lawyer and activist who protested outside the Terre Haute, Indiana, prison where the federal inmates were executed. “This is the easiest campaign promise to keep.”
His cautious approach demonstrates the practical and political difficulties of ending or truncating capital punishment after it’s been integral to the criminal justice system for centuries, even as popular support for the death penalty among both Democrats and Republicans wanes.
Support for the death penalty among Americans is at near-historic lows after peaking in the mid-1990s. Recent polls indicate support hovers around 55%, according to the nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.
Biden didn’t make capital punishment a prominent feature of his presidential run, but he did say on his campaign website that he would work “to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.”
That simple-sounding promise was historic because it wasn’t just about the federal death penalty, which, before former President Donald Trump, had been carried out just three times in the previous five decades. Then, 13 federal prisoners were executed during Trump’s last six months in office during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden’s promise also took direct aim at states, which, combined, have executed some 1,500 inmates since the 1970s; 27 states still have death penalty laws.
But the fact that the Biden administration chose to actively push for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s execution suggests the president’s opposition to the death penalty isn’t as all-inclusive as many activists believed.
Meanwhile, states have resorted to other means as drugs used in lethal injections have become increasingly hard to procure. Pharmaceutical companies in the 2000s began banning the use of their products for executions, saying they were meant to save lives, not take them. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons has declined to explain how it obtained pentobarbital for the lethal injections under Trump.
Some states have refurbished electric chairs as standbys for when lethal drugs are unavailable. This month, South Carolina halted two executions until the state could pull together firing squads.
Abe Bonowitz, director of the anti-capital punishment group Death Penalty Action, said he and other activists have spoken with administration officials and received some behind-thescenes assurances that Biden will eventually support legislation to abolish the federal death penalty.
“We know this is not the biggest fish they have to fry right now. But we are hearing they will get to it,” said Bonowitz, who has been critical of Biden’s silence.
The president could tell his Justice Department not to schedule federal executions during his term. But that would fall far short of fulfilling his campaign promise.
He could also use his executive powers to commute all federal death sentences to life in prison, but there’s no sign of that happening. Granting full clemency to everyone on death row could be politically problematic for Biden and other Democrats, who have slim majorities in the House and the Senate.
After Biden’s inauguration, the question of whether the president would act fast to end capital punishment was a popular topic on federal death row in Terre Haute, where discussions were often conducted through interconnected air vents.
It’s not discussed much these days, death row inmate Rejon Taylor told Associated Press recently through a prison email system.
“I won’t say that skepticism has settled in, but I will say that most no longer feel that immediate action will happen,” said Taylor, who was sentenced in 2008 for killing a restaurant owner.
Most inmates, he said, don’t believe they’ll be executed with Biden in office.