After Trump’s Execution Spree, Can Biden Stop the Death Penalty?

Anti-death penalty protesters gather in front of the Supreme Court, Jan. 17, 2017 [AFP/Brendan Smialowski]

By Lauren Gill

The Trump administration executed Lisa Montgomery last week, despite clear evidence that she was a victim of abuse and severely mentally ill, and concerns about her trial attorney’s performance.

Montgomery was the first woman to be executed by the federal government in 67 years. Following a spate of recent executions, activists and advocates have renewed calls to abolish the death penalty. But the question remains: Will Biden actually follow through on his campaign promise and push to make this happen?

It’s worth noting that Trump has now overseen more killings than all of the presidents in the past 56 years combined. After restarting executions in July after a long hiatus, his administration has executed 13 people.

Just last week, the administration also executed Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs – both Black men. America’s death rows have been shown to be racially disproportionate; approximately 42% of its death row population is Black, compared to 42% white. Seven of the 13 people executed by the federal government since July have been people of color.

In response to Trump’s execution spree, advocates and politicians are calling for President-elect Joe Biden, who campaigned on a promise to end the federal death penalty (the practice is still legal in 28 states as well) to stop executions, commute the sentences of people on federal death row to life without parole and order the Department of Justice to stop seeking the death penalty.

“He must honor that commitment, and he must begin this work by taking steps fully within his power,” said Cassandra Stubbs, the executive director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, in a statement. “[It’s] the only adequate response to the degrading and unconstitutional execution spree, and to ensure that the federal government is never able to do this again.”

Lawmakers Tim Kaine, Ayanna Pressley and Dick Durbin also reintroduced legislation to end the federal death penalty last week, noting its racial disparities. “State-sanctioned murder is not justice,” Pressley told NPR in an interview about the bill. "While we're in the midst of this national reckoning on racial justice, abolishing the death penalty must be a part of that discourse but also our legislative actions.”

There are 50 people still on federal death row (the Trump administration’s executions cleared nearly a quarter of it), but the majority of the country’s 2,500 death row prisoners have been sentenced to die by states, where abolishing the death penalty is dependent on state legislative or court action, or the U.S. Supreme Court declaring the practice unconstitutional. Biden has vowed to incentivize states to abolish the death penalty, but he has offered no details on how he intends to do so.

To begin, Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told me it is crucial that Biden takes action during his term to end the federal death penalty and clear its death row. “If the administration merely says that it will impose a moratorium on federal executions, it is simply kicking the can down the road so that prisoners who are unfairly tried and unfairly sentenced to death will face execution on somebody else’s watch.”

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