Creators Syndicate
September 23, 2024
Imagine a candidate seeking reelection to the office of
president of the United States who would systematically start executing
condemned prisoners in the midst of an election. Using the death chamber to
curry favor with a segment of the electorate is callous and unconscionable.
Are there no limits to what a political candidate will do to
get elected? Let's look back at 2020. In the second half of that year, amid a
pandemic and a reelection campaign, the Trump administration decided to start
executing federal prisoners.
After 17 years without an execution, the federal government
carried out 13 executions in a little more than six months. To put those
numbers into context, there have been 14 executions in all death penalty states
so far this year. In 2020, there were only seven executions in five states. In
2021, there were eight executions in the same number of states — all below the
Mason-Dixon line.
The Trump administration conducted more executions in five
months than any other presidency since the turn of the 20th century and carried
out six executions during a presidential transition period, more than any other
administration in the history of the United States. Prior to 2020, the federal
government carried out only three executions in the modern era of the death
penalty, most notably Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.
Whether it was a ploy to bolster his tough-guy bona fides or
a lowbrow pitch to his "law and order" constituency, then-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.
The Trump administration oversaw 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.
As the president faced an unprecedented second impeachment
trial, his machinery of death kept chugging along. After Trump incited his
"law and order" supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,
resulting in death and mayhem, 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 the mother. 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. One day after Montgomery's execution, Corey Johnson, with
an IQ of 69, was executed.
With only days left in his "reign," Trump had one
more execution to carry out. A U.S. circuit court overturned a stay from a
lower court to allow Dustin Higgs to recover from COVID-19. He was executed on
Jan. 16, 2021, only days before Trump "unwillingly" left office.
There has not been a federal execution since. Executions in
this country are almost exclusively in the South, the number of annual
executions has dramatically declined since the 1990s, and the number of death
sentences are at an all-time low.
Yet, if a candidate wants to flex his "law and
order" muscles, the death penalty is an easy choice, and nobody has
demonstrated that in a more frightening manner than Donald Trump.
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 X @MatthewTMangino.
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