Trump breaks 130-year tradition, speeding up executions of prisoners before stepping down as president

As Donald Trump’s presidency draws to a close, his administration is stepping up the pace of the federal executions despite an increase in coronavirus cases in prisons, announcing plans for five starting Thursday and ending days before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20.

The outgoing president also breaks with a 130-year tradition of suspended executions during the presidential transition.

If all five go as planned, there will be 13 executions since July, when the Republican government resumed executions of detainees after a 17-year hiatus and will cement Trump’s legacy as president. with the greatest number of executions in decades.

He will step down as president after executing about 25% of all federal prisoners on death row, despite little support for the death penalty among Democrats and Republicans.

In a recent interview with the Associated Press, Attorney General William Barr defended the extension of executions in the post-election period, noting that he will likely plan more before he leaves the Justice Department. The Biden government said: should run them.

“I think the way to end the death penalty is to revoke it,” Barr said.

The plan breaks with the tradition of outgoing presidents of deferring to incoming presidents the policy on which differ so markedly, said Robert Durham, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, without partisan affiliation.

“Historical aberration”

Biden, a Democrat, he’s against it the death penalty, and his spokesperson told the PA that he will fight to end the death penalty when he takes office.

“It’s hard to understand why anyone at this point in the presidency feels compelled to kill all of these people – especially when the American people voted for someone else to replace them and that person has declared s ‘oppose punishment … death,’ Durham noted. historical aberration”.

The five executions will begin this week, starting with Brandon Bernard, 40, and Alfred Bourgeois, 56. Both should be executed in a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Since the United States Supreme Court reinstated the federal death penalty in 1988, federal executions have been rare.

Before Trump took office, only three federal executions had taken place during this period.

All were held under Republican President George W. Bush, and included the inmate Timothy mcveigh, convicted of the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. Since 2003, no federal executions have taken place.

States, yeah

States continued to execute prisoners in state prisons, resulting in the death of 22 prisoners sentenced to death last year. But state executions have also a downward trend.

A growing number of people have mobilized to abolish the death penalty completely, and most have officially banned the practice or have not executed prisoners in over a decade.

Popular opinion has also avoided the death penalty. A Gallup poll from November 2019 found that 60% of Americans support life imprisonment on the death penalty for the first time since the investigation began more than 30 years ago.

With AP information

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