Death Penalty News

When historians look back and evaluate the Trump presidency, one focus will be the instigation of the federal death penalty. Until the execution of Daniel Lee Lewis on Jan 14, 2020, no federal prisoner had been executed in 17 years. The execution of Lisa Montgomery was even more extreme - no woman had been put to death by the federal government in 67 years, the last one being in 1953.  A Political Punishment Apart from restarting federal executions, another quagmire was Trump's insistence on carrying out executions even after election defeat . Whether one supports or opposes the death penalty, both sides can likely agree that it is a political issue. And political issues can bring political rewards. In the United States, prosecutors gain accolades when a sentence of death is pronounced. And then a second time - in the not so usual instance - if the accused is put to death. Politicians often have much to gain. Preaching that law and order is necessary, and that the death penalty kee...

As he rushes executions and promotes barbaric practices, Trump and his lame-duck administration are making the best argument for a permanent end to capital punishment Precisely one week before Thanksgiving, Orlando Hall became the eighth person incarcerated in federal prisons to be executed this year after Attorney General William Barr lifted a 17-year ban on the federal government’s implementation of the death penalty . When Hall, 49, was killed by lethal injection, he became the first person that a lame-duck administration has executed in more than 100 years. This wasn’t some sort of scheduling happenstance, caused by a rapid succession of appeals that pushed Hall’s date down the calendar. No, his date quickly followed the killing of Christopher Vialva in late September, and Barr has scheduled five more before Biden is inaugurated as president. His Department of Justice just concluded that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud, which we all knew — but Barr clearly reali...

With less than two weeks remaining before the election, and President Donald Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in the polls, Trump is traveling to battleground states and holding rallies with his often unmasked and often not socially-distanced base. His closing argument appears to be more of the same: He’s been the very best president America has ever seen, especially in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Meanwhile the death toll climbs to numbers once thought unimaginable. Trump’s presidency will be remembered for so many things—the rampant corruption, the dismantling of our public institutions—but nothing more deadly than his disastrous response to the pandemic. Whether or not he is defeated, however, the post-election period will be especially lethal—and not just because of the anticipated spike in COVID-19 cases.  The Trump administration announced in 2019 that the federal government was resuming its executions. This summer, while the pandemic was still rag...

A former Texas man convicted of murdering 2 youth ministers when he was 19 was executed on Thursday, the 7th federal inmate and the 1st Black man put to death since Attorney General William P. Barr announced the resumption of federal executions last year. The inmate, Christopher Andre Vialva, 40, had been convicted in 2000 of carjacking and murdering the couple, Todd and Stacie Bagley, who were visiting Texas from Iowa and had just attended Sunday services, the Justice Department said. Mr. Vialva was executed by lethal injection and pronounced dead at 6:46 p.m. at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., according to the Bureau of Prisons. Before he was executed, he said a prayer for the Bagleys’ relatives, asking God to “take away the pain and hatred in their hearts,” according to his lawyer, Susan M. Otto. Several of the Bagleys’ family members and loved ones witnessed the execution, Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said. “More than two decades after Christopher...

(RNS) — With some 150,000 lives lost, it’s entirely appropriate that the pandemic takes up most of our attention. In the frenzy of courageous nurses, doctors and scientists to save lives, not many of us have room for another catastrophe. For that reason you might have missed, or even ignored, the catastrophe that is taking place in every American’s name. The federal government started executing people this month, after going 17 years without a single federal execution. In fact, the three people executed over the course of four days in July is more than the United States has put to death in half a century. No president, Republican or Democrat, has executed as many people since 1948, when Harry Truman was in the White House. It’s alarming, but it may only be the beginning. The next federal execution is scheduled for Aug. 28 [ Aug. 26 - DPN ], and there are 59 more federal inmates facing the death penalty.  The resumption of executions is not an isolated effort, but th...

From Confederate statues to blasting NASCAR, President leans in on white anxieties. AP - President Donald Trump is wielding America’s racial tensions as a reelection weapon, fiercely denouncing the racial justice movement on a near-daily basis with language stoking white resentment and aiming to drive his supporters to the polls. The incendiary discourse is alarming many in his own party and running contrary to the advice of some in his inner circle, who believe it risks alienating independent and suburban voters. It’s a pattern that harks back to cultural divisions Trump similarly exploited in his victorious 2016 campaign. “It’s not about who is the object of the derision or the vitriol. The actual issue is understanding the appeal to white resentment and white fear,” said Eddie Glaude, chair of the Department of African American studies at Princeton University. “It’s all rooted in this panic about the place of white people in this new America.” Though Trump has lon...

Anthony Davis' opera The Central Park Five , with a libretto by Richard Wesley, has won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Music. The Pulitzer jury cited The Central Park Five as "a courageous operatic work, marked by powerful vocal writing and sensitive orchestration, that skillfully transforms a notorious example of contemporary injustice into something empathetic and hopeful." The full opera was premiered last June at California's Long Beach Opera ; it was reworked from an earlier piece, Five, which premiered in Newark at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in 2016. The piece is a musical treatment of a still-raw subject: the 1989 convictions of five African-American and Latino teenagers of the rape and assault of a white woman, Trisha Meili, in Central Park that April. The five teenagers' convictions were vacated in 2002, after a serial rapist, Matias Reyes, admitted to the horrific crime. DNA evidence substantiated his confession. The five men sett...

Attorney General William Barr’s decision to order the resumption of federal executions, presumably at the order of Donald Trump, was treated by most of the media as a one-day story. It seemed to come out of the blue, and to have no strategic thought behind it — just another nasty, impulsive conservative policy emanating from an administration that continually emits such unpleasant proposals. But I believe there was nothing impulsive about it. This was the springing of a political trap intended to shore up the “law-and-order” credentials of an inherently lawless administration. The decision also appears aimed to force the hand of Democrats — to get them to go on record opposing the death penalty, and thus, by extension, be seen as “weak on crime” and somehow simpatico with the five men who now stand to be executed later this year. On one level, this is simply “politics as usual.” U.S. politicians have a long and sordid tradition of politicizing the death penalty during electi...