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January 15, 2021
Only five states carried out a total of seven
executions across the United States last year. That is the fewest state
executions in nearly 40 years. However, that is not the full story when it
comes to the death penalty in America.
In the second half of 2020, in the midst of a
pandemic and a reelection campaign, the Trump Administration decided to get
back into the act of executing federal prisoners. After going 17 years without
carrying out an execution the federal government carried out 10 executions in
less than six months.
By the end of 2020, the federal government had
conducted more executions in five months than any other presidency since the
turn of the 20th century, and scheduled more executions during a presidential
transition period than any other administration in the history of the United
States - knowing President-elect Joe Biden campaigned on abolishing the federal
death penalty.
Whether it was a ploy to bolster his tough guy bona fides
or a lowbrow pitch to his “law and order” constituency, President Donald
Trump’s bloodlust saw no boundary.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center,
those executed by the federal government included the first Native American
ever executed by the federal government for the murder of a member of his own
tribe on tribal lands.
This fall saw the first federal execution in 68
years of an offender who was a teenager at the time the crime was committed.
The federal executions of 2020 included the first
federal execution in 57 years for a crime committed in a state that had
abolished the death penalty, as well as executions carried out against the
wishes of the victims’ families and the first lame-duck executions in more than
a century.
The executions carried out in the midst of a
pandemic contributed to a COVID-19 outbreak in the Federal Correctional Complex
in Terre Haute, Indiana. The outbreak infected at least nine members of federal
execution teams, several lawyers and at least one religious advisor.
As the president faces an unprecedented second
impeachment trial - his machinery of death keeps chugging along. This week,
after the president incited his “law and order” supporters to storm the Capitol
resulting in the death of five people, including a Capitol Hill police officer,
Lisa Montgomery was executed. She was the first woman executed in the federal
system in nearly seven decades.
Montgomery committed a very heinous crime. In 2004,
she cut an unborn fetus from the womb of her mother. Montgomery had faked a
pregnancy. She drove from her home in Kansas to the victim’s home in Missouri.
After strangling Bobbi Stinnett, whom she knew from dog breeding, Montgomery
cut open her abdomen and kidnapped her fetus. Fetal abduction is rare, but more
than 25 cases of violent fetal abductions have occurred in the last two
decades.
According to NBC News, Montgomery’s lawyers did not
argue that she didn’t deserve to be punished, but rather that the jury never
fully learned of her severe mental illnesses as diagnosed by doctors.
Corey Johnson was executed two days after
Montgomery. Johnson had an IQ of 69 and had contracted COVID-19.
With only days left in his “reign,” Trump has one
more execution planned. A U.S. Circuit Court recently cleared the way for the
execution to move forward. The court overturned a stay from a lower court
delaying the execution until March to allow Dustin Higgs to recover from
COVID-19.
Higgs could dodge the executioner’s needle but-for
the wishes of a disgraced president who on his last days in office would rather
inflict death than impart mercy.
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg,
Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was
released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and
follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.
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