Donald Trump’s sinister and disturbing execution spree

It is, quite simply put, vile.

Amidst everything (and there is much) that has been disturbing, dysfunctional and certainly frightening about the state of politics in the United States this year, one of the most harrowing and sinister storylines of all has received very little attention. Donald Trump has embarked on an unprecedented killing spree, overseeing far more executions on federal death row this year than in any year since reliable statistics began to be gathered in 1927. 

And he is not finished. Three more people on federal death row – Lisa Montgomery, Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs – are scheduled to be executed next month before Joe Biden is set to assume the presidency on January 20, 2021.  Lisa Montgomery would be the first woman executed by the federal government in 67 years.  There will undoubtedly be legal challenges and campaigns for commutation in an effort to stave off their executions, currently set for January 12, 14 and 15.

Thirteen people have been executed federally in the United States since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988 after a 16-year hiatus following a 1972 Supreme Court ruling. But, until this year, federal authorities were reluctant to actually carry out executions. That is what makes the statistics for 2020 particularly chilling. Ten of those 13 executions have occurred this year alone, three since Donald Trump lost the presidential election. The other three all took place during the George W. Bush presidency. 

The number of people killed this year under Donald Trump’s watch in fact, accounts for 21% of the 47 federal executions carried out over the past 93 years, since 1927. That will rise to 26% if the executions scheduled for January do go ahead.

All of this is even more disturbing by virtue of the fact that incoming President-Elect Biden has made it clear that he will “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level.” By the time this is done, Donald Trump may well have allowed six executions to go ahead while an incoming abolitionist president is poised to take office.

And they are of course names, not mere statistics: Daniel Lewis Lee, Wesley Ira Purkey, Dustin Lee Honken, Lezmond Mitchell, Keith Nelson, William LeCroy Jr, Christopher Vialva, Orlando Hall, Brandon Bernard and Alfred Bourgeois have been killed by the Trump Administration over the past five months.

As is always the case with the death penalty in the United States, it is corrupted by the racism that infects the justice system more widely. 41% of individuals on death row in the United States are Black and 42% are white, wildly disproportionate to the overall US population which is 13% Black and 76% white. If the 3 executions slated for January do go ahead it will bring the total number of executions over the six months between July 2020 and January 2021 to thirteen: 6 Black men, 5 white men, 1 white woman and 1 Native American man. 46% of the individuals executed federally during those six months will have been Black.

Overwhelmingly, executions in the United States are carried out by state governments.  The Death Penalty Information Centre records 1526 executions in the United States since 1976, nearly 45 years. Only 13 of those executions have been carried out by the federal government; 10 of which, as noted above, have taken place in just this year. 22 states retain the death penalty on their statute books. Last year seven states carried out 22 executions and there were no federal executions. This year to date 17 people have been executed in the United Sates; seven in five states, and 10 federally.  

That adds another harrowing overlay to this federal killing spree.  So far, 59% of the executions in the United States in 2020 have been carried out by the federal government. It is dramatically and disgracefully out of step with the general momentum in the United States towards fewer executions and a growing number of US states moving to abolish the death penalty altogether. It was abolished in New Hampshire last year and in Colorado this year. Amnesty International notes that globally as well – with some obvious and disturbing outliers such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iraq – the trend is towards fewer executions and more countries moving to abolish the death penalty.

The death penalty is the ultimate violation of what is perhaps the most precious right of all, the right to life.  Of course, the terrible crimes for which people have often been sentenced to death are often heinous and demand justice. Nothing about the death penalty, however, represents or delivers justice.  Instead, it perpetuates an unending circle of retribution in which death leads to death, violence to more violence, victims to more victims, shattered families to more shattered families.  As many have pointed out, it is rooted in the moral and practical fallacy that killing people is a sensible way to send the message that killing people is wrong.

And the worldover, including the United States, is has long been abundantly clear that the manner in which the death penalty is delivered amplifies that fundamental injustice. In many countries it is used as a means of persecution, including by targeting political opponents, religious minorities, and LGBTQ individuals. The ugly racism that permeates the use of the death penalty in the US is well-documented, as is the undeniable fact that overwhelmingly poor people are sentenced to death and rich people are not. And while there are US constitutional safeguards against executing individuals who are mentally ill or disabled, that concern still rears its head time and time again.  

Failure to ensure procedural fairness and due process haunts death penalty trials everywhere and always. While international law makes it clear that, at an absolute minimum, minors should never be executed and the death penalty should only be imposed for the most serious crimes, those restrictions are blatantly disregarded by several governments. And the shocking number of wrongful convictions in US capital cases only continues to mount; the errors sometimes thankfully coming to light before execution; but other times, irreversibly, coming too late.

The effort to end the death penalty has made great progress over the past several decades, all of which is the result of often heroic efforts by prisoners, families, lawyers and activists to reveal its cruelty and fundamental injustice. We must maintain that momentum, as there is some distance to go yet. Donald Trump’s willingness to send twelve men and one woman to face the executioner in the span of six months makes that abundantly clear.

Join the call for federal executions to be halted. Death Penalty Action has links to petitions and suggestions for letter-writing and Amnesty International has an Urgent Action.