Throughout his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump signaled he would resume federal executions if he won and make more people eligible for capital punishment, including child rapists, migrants who kill U.S. citizens and law enforcement officers, and those convicted of drug and human trafficking, reported NBC News.
“These are terrible, terrible, horrible people who are
responsible for death, carnage and crime all over the country,” Trump said of traffickers when he announced his 2024
candidacy. “We’re going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, gets caught, to
receive the death penalty for their heinous acts,” he added.
While it remains unclear how Trump would act to expand the
death penalty, anti-death penalty groups and criminal justice reform advocates
say they are taking his claims seriously, noting the spree of federal executions that occurred during his first
term.
“We’re going to fight this tooth and nail, and we’re going
to seek to uphold the constitutional principals that do not call for this
expansion,” said Yasmin Cader, an ACLU deputy legal director and the director
of its Trone Center for Justice and Equality.
At the tail end of Trump’s first term, 13 federal inmates
were put to death — even as the pandemic led states to halt executions because
of Covid concerns in prisons. The cases included the first woman executed by the federal government in
nearly 70 years; the youngest person based on the age when the crime
occurred (18 at the time of his arrest); and the only Native American on federal death row.
No president had overseen as many federal executions since Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s, and the U.S.
government had not executed anyone for more than 15 years until Trump revived
the practice.
His then-attorney general, William Barr, had said that the
federal government “owed it to victims to carry out the sentence imposed by the
justice system.”
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