CHICAGO (AP) – Joe Biden, the first sitting US president to openly oppose the death penalty, has discussed the possibility of instructing the Justice Department to stop planning new executions, officials have told The Associated Press. .
If he does, it would end an extraordinary series of executions by the federal government, all during a pandemic raging inside prison walls. and infected journalists, federal employees and even those who have been put to death.
The officials were aware of the private conversations with Biden, but were not authorized to speak about it publicly.
When asked on Friday about Biden’s plans regarding the death penalty, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said she had nothing to offer on the matter.
Action to stop planning new executions could immediately put Biden under pressure from opponents of the death penalty. But they want him to go much further, from flattening the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, to breaking the death penalty completely under US statutes.
A look at the steps Biden could take and the challenges he would face:
Q: WHY THE PRESSURE FOR ACTION NOW?
A: While the coronavirus pandemic and election coverage dominated the news last year, many Americans paying close attention to the resumption of the federal executions under President Donald Trump were appalled at their scale and the apparent rush to carry them out.
The executions begin on July 14 and ended four days before Biden’s inauguration January 20 saw the first federal executions in 17 years. More were detained under Trump in the past six months than in the previous 56 years combined.
Executions continued for prisoners whose lawyers claimed were too mentally ill or too intellectually disabled to fully understand why they were being put to death.
Lawyers for Lisa Montgomery, convicted of killing a pregnant Missouri woman and cutting out her baby, said her mental illness was caused in part by years of gruesome sexual abuse as a child. On January 13, she became the first woman to be federally executed in almost 70 years.
Q: WOULD A DECISION TO STOP PLANNING PERFORMANCE END PRACTICE?
A: Biden cannot guarantee federal executions during his presidency by simply telling the Justice Department never to schedule an execution. But that wouldn’t stop a future president who supports the death penalty from rebooting them.
Barack Obama, for whom Biden served as vice president, placed an informal moratorium on conducting federal executions while he was president, which ordered a review of execution methods in 2014 following a failed state execution in Oklahoma.
But Obama never took steps to end the federal executions for good. That left the door open for Trump to resume them. Critics of the death penalty want Biden to slam that door.
Q: WHAT ARE THE OPTIONS OF BIDEN?
A: The surest way to prevent a future president from starting executions again is to sign a bill abolishing the federal death penalty. That would require Congress to pass such a bill.
Thirty-seven members of Congress in a Jan. 22 letter urged Biden to support the federal death penalty prohibition law sponsored by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., And Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.
But Biden should convince Republicans. In the 22 states that have banned the death penalty from their statutes, none has managed to pass the required laws without bipartisan support.
Biden was able to immediately invoke his presidential powers and do what Obama did not: convert the death sentences of 50 prisoners still on death row in Terre Haute into life sentences. None of the death sentences can ever be recovered.
Commutations alone would not stop prosecutors from demanding the death penalty in new cases. That would require an instruction to Biden’s Justice Department never to authorize prosecutors to search for them.
Death Penalty Action has called on Biden to order the destruction of the Terre Haute death chamber building. Demolishing the dismal, windowless facility, Abe Bonowitz, director of the Ohio-based group, claimed would symbolize Biden’s dedication to ending federal executions for good.
Q: DID THE TRUMP VERSIONS GIVE OPPONENTS OF THE DEADLY PENALTY?
A: The breakneck pace and unrelenting pressure from the government in the courts to get them done incited opponents – and also attracted new supporters to their case, said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
“Trump demonstrated more than ever before what the abuse of the death penalty would look like,” he said. “It has created a political opportunity, which is why opponents of the death penalty want the president to strike while the iron is hot.”
Death Penalty Action, which organized protests outside the US prison in Terre Haute during the executions, saw the number of donors, signing petitions or requesting information rise from 20,000 to 600,000 in the past six months.
Bonowitz said interest grew after reality TV star Kim Kardashian pleaded on Twitter that Trump commute Brandon Bernard’s death sentence to life. Bernard was nevertheless executed on December 10.
Q: WILL A BID GET A PUSHBACK IF IT WANTS TO END THE FEDERAL DEATH PENALTY?
A: Yes, and not just because of capital punishment advocates in the Republican Party. It may also come from some members of his own party who will consider bids to abolish the death penalty politically a lost issue.
Clearing death row would also mean sparing the lives of murderers like Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who shot nine black members of a South Carolina church in 2015 during a Bible study. Biden would be put in the uncomfortable position of explaining to the victims’ families why Roof and other killers shouldn’t die.
While support for the death penalty in general has fallen to just over 50% in recent years, many Americans don’t want to rule out the possibility of a death sentence in terrorist cases like the Boston Marathon bombing. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted in that attack, which killed three people and injured hundreds.
The Supreme Court is currently under consideration an appeal from the Trump administration that sought to reverse a lower court ruling throwing out Tsarnaev’s death warrant. The Biden government may soon have to decide whether to pursue that appeal or tell the high court that the government now accepts the lower court’s decision.
Q: ARE THERE DIRECTIONS ON WHAT BIDEN CAN DO?
A: Biden has not talked about the death penalty for long since he became president. And he didn’t make the death penalty a prominent part of his presidential campaign.
On a criminal justice reform campaign page, Biden pledged “to pass legislation to abolish the death penalty at the federal level and encourage states to follow the example of the federal government.” He gave no details.
Biden may also feel compelled to do something big about the death penalty, given his previous support for it. He was pivotal as a senator in the passage of a 1994 crime bill that significantly expanded the number of federal crimes for which someone can be put to death. Several prisoners executed under Trump were convicted under the provisions of that bill.
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Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo in Washington contributed to this report.
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