CHICAGO (AP) – Joe Biden, the first US president to openly oppose the death penalty, discussed the possibility of instructing the Justice Department to stop scheduling new executions, officials told the Associated Press.
Doing so will end an extraordinary series of executions by the federal government, all during a pandemic that raged within prison walls. and infected journalists, federal officials and even those who have been sentenced to death.
Officials were aware of the private discussions with Biden, but were not allowed to speak publicly about them.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki, when asked on Friday about Biden’s plans for the death penalty, said she had nothing to do with it.
Action to prevent the scheduling of further executions could take Biden’s immediate pressure from opponents of the death penalty. But they want him to go much further, from destroying the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, to completely eliminating the death penalty from US statutes.
A look at the steps Biden could take and the challenges he would face:
Q: WHY PRESS YOU FOR ACTION NOW?
A: Although the coronavirus pandemic and electoral coverage dominated the news last year, many Americans who paid close attention to the resumption of federal executions under President Donald Trump were dismayed by its scale and the apparent rush to execute them.
Executions, starting on July 14 and ending four days before Biden’s inauguration on January 20, they were the first federal executions in 17 years. More have been accomplished in the past six months under Trump than in the previous 56 years combined.
The executions took place for prisoners whose lawyers claimed to be too mentally ill or intellectually disabled to fully understand why they were being sentenced to death.
Lawyers for Lisa Montgomery, convicted of killing a pregnant woman in Missouri and cutting her baby, said her mental illness was partially triggered by years of horrific sexual abuse as a child. On January 13, she became the first federally executed woman in almost 70 years.
Q: A DECISION TO DISCONTINUE SCHEDULING EXECUTIONS END OF PRACTICE?
A: Biden cannot guarantee federal executions during his presidency by simply telling the Department of Justice to never schedule any. But that would not prevent a future president who supports the death penalty from restarting them.
Barack Obama, for whom Biden served as vice president, imposed an informal moratorium on carrying out federal executions when he was presidentrequesting a review of enforcement methods in 2014, following a failed state execution in Oklahoma.
But Obama never took any steps to end federal executions permanently. This left the door open for Trump to retake them. Critics of the death penalty want Biden to shut the door tightly.
Q: WHAT IS THE RANGE OF BIDEN OPTIONS?
A: The safest way to prevent a future president from restarting executions is to sign a bill abolishing the federal death penalty. This would require Congress to approve such a bill.
Thirty-seven members of Congress urged Biden in a January 22 letter to support the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act, sponsored by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., And Senator Dick Durbin, D-Ill.
But Biden would have to persuade Republicans. In the 22 states that have applied the death penalty in their statutes, none have been able to pass the required laws without bipartisan support.
Biden could immediately resort to his presidential powers and do what Obama didn’t do: commute 50 death sentences to life in prison – some of them still on death row in Terre Haute. None of the death sentences could be restored.
The commutations themselves would not prevent prosecutors from seeking death sentences in new cases. This would require an instruction to the Biden Department of Justice to never authorize prosecutors to seek them out.
The Death Penalty Action asked Biden to order the demolition of the Terre Haute mortuary building. Demolishing desolate, windowless facilities, argued Abe Bonowitz, director of the Ohio-based group, would symbolize Biden’s commitment to stop federal executions forever.
Q: HAVE TRUMP EXECUTIONS RE-ENERGIZED DEATH PENALTY OPPONENTS?
A: The breakneck pace and the government’s relentless pressure on the courts to complete them galvanized opponents – and also attracted new adherents to their cause, said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
“Trump demonstrated in a more graphic way than at any other time what abuse of the death penalty would be like,” he said. “This created a political opportunity, which is why opponents of the death penalty want the president to attack while the iron is hot.”
Death Penalty Action, which organized protests outside the United States penitentiary in Terre Haute during the executions, saw the number of people donating, signing petitions or asking for information, rose from 20,000 to 600,000 in the past six months.
Bonowitz said interest rose after reality show star Kim Kardashian asked on Twitter for Trump to switch Brandon Bernard’s death sentence to life. Bernard was executed anyway on December 10.
Q: WILL BIDEN BE PUSHBACK IF LOOKING FOR THE END OF THE FEDERAL DEATH PENALTY?
A: Yes, and not just from the proponents of the death penalty in the Republican Party. It may also come from some members of your own party, who will see proposals to abolish the death penalty as a politically defeated issue.
Cleaning up death row would also mean saving the lives of murderers like Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who in 2015 killed nine black members of a South Carolina church during a Bible study. Biden would be put in the uncomfortable position of having to explain to the victims’ families why Roof and other killers should not die.
Although support for the death penalty in general has dropped to just over 50% in recent years, many Americans may not want to rule out the possibility of a death sentence in cases of terrorism, such as the Boston Marathon attack. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted of this attack, which killed three people and wounded hundreds.
The Supreme Court is currently considering an appeal from the Trump administration that sought to reverse a lower court decision that rejected Tsarnaev’s death sentence. The Biden government may have to decide soon whether to continue the appeal or to tell the higher court that the government now accepts the lower court’s decision.
Q: ARE THERE CLAYS ON WHAT BIDEN CAN DO?
A: Biden hasn’t said much about the death penalty since he became president. And he did not make the death penalty a prominent feature of his presidential campaign.
On a campaign page on criminal justice reform, Biden pledged to “pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level and encourage states to follow the example of the federal government.” He did not offer details.
Biden may also feel compelled to do something big about the death penalty, given his previous support for it. He played a central role as a senator in passing a 1994 criminal bill that greatly increased the number of federal crimes for which someone could be sentenced to death. Several prisoners executed under Trump were convicted and sentenced according to the provisions of that bill.
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Associated Press editor Michael Balsamo in Washington contributed to this report.
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