USA | What Biden’s Win Means for the Future of the Death Penalty

Biden can’t unilaterally end the death penalty, but he can speed up its demise and use symbolism to signal a new era.

Ultimately, the death penalty is symbolic. It has never been used to punish more than a tiny fraction of the most serious murders, but it makes very long prison sentences appear lenient by comparison.

On the campaign trail, Biden said he’d work to end the federal government’s use of the death penalty. His record is mixed. As a senator, he pushed for a bill in which “we do everything but hang people for jaywalking,” but also fought to make sure death-row prisoners had good lawyers. He now argues that some serious crimes should still lead to life sentences without parole, which some consider worse than execution.

Although only Congress can fully abolish the federal death penalty, the president can do a great deal to speed its yearslong decline across the country.

Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, oversaw the most federal executions of any presidential administration since Eisenhower. A new attorney general could stop them immediately, and return to the Obama-era practice of seeking no executions.

A new attorney general could tell U.S. attorneys to only seek new death sentences for rare crimes like terrorism and mass shootings, which would still apply to defendants like Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev.

Biden could also initiate a moratorium on executions and halt all action while his administration studies the punishment’s use, which President Barack Obama promised but never delivered.

Most death sentences are handed out in state courts, but the president can push states to slow down executions, by withholding federal grants unless states guarantee that death row prisoners have access to DNA tests that may help them prove their innocence.

Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said the president could set up a project to help defend military veterans who commit serious crimes. “There is a unique federal interest in protecting people who have served the country,” he explained, noting many veterans develop PTSD or suffer head trauma in service and their lawyers struggle to get their military records.

If Biden wants to really opt for symbolism, he could follow the lead of California Gov. Gavin Newsom—who ordered that the state’s execution chamber be dismantled last year—and close the federal chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana. He could also aggressively pursue a mass clemency campaign, commuting the sentences of the more than 50 people currently on federal death row, if he believes that the death penalty system is too broken to be fixed.

Source: themarshallproject.org,Maurice Chammah, November 8, 2020

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,

but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

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Florida | 2-time Jacksonville baby abuser is set for execution

Thirty years ago while on probation for fracturing an infant’s skull, Andrew Lukehart inflicted at least five blows to the head of another baby, then concocted a story that she was abducted before eventually leading authorities to her body in a swamp area. At 6 p.m. Tuesday, June 2, the 53-year-old from Jacksonville is set to become Florida’s eighth man on death row to be executed in 2026. He will become the 36th under Gov. Ron DeSantis after a record 19 inmates were executed by the state in 2025, including another from Duval County: Michael Bell.

Can the state execute a man who already survived? | Opinion

A second execution would be an unimaginable nightmare for Tony Carruthers and a moral horror for the rest of us. Tony Carruthers is not supposed to be alive . On May 21, Tennessee set out to execute him. It failed. Carruthers survived. He is not the first person to survive an execution in the United States, and he won’t be the last. For Carruthers, the question is: Now what? Will the state seek to arrange a second execution?

Iraq: German schoolgirl, 17, turned jihadi bride escapes death penalty and is jailed for six years

GERMAN Jihadi bride Linda Wenzel has been jailed for six years in Baghdad for her role as an Islamic enforcer with terror group ISIS. Wenzel, 17, who last year sobbed on TV “I have ruined my life,” could have faced the death penalty. German media reported that a German embassy representative in Iraq was in court yesterday to witness her sentencing. She received five years for joining IS and one year for entering Iraq illegally. Wenzel was found in the rubble of IS stronghold Mosul back in the summer of 2017. Charges were laid against her and three other German women captured with her. Schoolgirl Wenzel fled to Turkey then into Syria last year from her hometown of Pulsnitz in eastern Germany after being groomed online by a Chechen IS fighter who she married. He was killed in the savage fighting for Mosul while she was employed by the terror group enforcing the strict Islamic dress code on women in the city. She burst into tears after her capture and said s...

Florida | The Daily Routine of Death Row Inmates

The breakfast carts rattle through the concrete prison at about 5:30 am and as they approach Death Row the first sounds of morning repeat the last sounds of night - remote controlled locks clanging open and clunking closed, electric gates whirring, heavy metal doors crashing shut, voices wailing, klaxons blaring. A maximum security prison has no soft or delicate sounds. At the end of each corridor of death row cells a guard opens a heavy door of steel bars and a prison trusty pushes a breakfast cart inside. The door closes behind him and when it locks a second door opens and admits the trusty to the wing. He steers his cart along the wing stopping at each cell to pass a tray of powdered eggs and lukewarm grits through a small slot on the bars.

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