The Trump Administration Resumes Killing People
On This Day In 2019
A five-decade pause. The federal death penalty had been mostly suspended or unused by presidents of both parties for 48 years…until along came Donald Trump.
OTDI 2019, Trump’s Justice Department directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to restart executions. By the time Trump fled office six months later, there had been at least 13 executions, including an acceleration during his final weeks in office.
Casting aside presidential tradition. Whether they were generally in favor of or against the death penalty, there's one tradition that presidents had followed for over 130 years: During times of presidential transitions, they paused executions. Not Trump! Yet again, he destroyed a system that so many of his predecessors had felt duty-bound to honor. His Administration hurried to execute five shortly before his time ran out.
(A digression re timing: In 2016, Trump's team and top GOPers invented a theory that Obama was obligated to pause the process of filling an empty Supreme Court seat nine months before a presidential transition; but Trump had no problem destroying tradition by ramping up his killing spree in the days just before his term was up. Also along those lines, Aileen Cannon was voted on, and took her position as federal court judge, after Trump had already lost in '20. Cannon, of course, went on to throw out the indictments of Trump regarding his theft and retention of documents at his Florida house. Does that man have any consistent principles?).
Biden reinstates: Biden reinstated the death penalty ban once he was in office, although he loosened it for exceptional cases such as the Boston Marathon bomber.
Dive Deeper
Here's the original announcement from Trump's Department of Justice
The BBC covered the acceleration of the executions in Trump’s final days
Read about Biden reinstating the pause in the NYT
Pic: Ken Piorkowski