Death Penalty News

Even without Tuesday’s execution of William LeCroy, the Trump Administration had already racked up more executions in ten weeks than any president since the 1950's. With today’s (9/24/2020) execution of Christopher Vialva, there will be several additional noteworthy facts about this federal execution spree: Seven federal executions within eleven weeks ties the seven executions during President Harry Truman’s entire 8 years in office. This is the first federal execution of a prisoner who was still in his teens at the time of the crime, who was also developmentally delayed due to a bout of meningitis as an infant. This will be the first federal execution of a Black man after five Caucasians and the only American Indian on death row. No other federal executions are currently scheduled, but the original intention of these executions has been achieved. The president’s reelection campaign scripted these executions perfectly as part of their “law and order” messaging. In fact, immediate...

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...

The question to Michael Dukakis, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1988, was brutally personal. "If Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?" Bernard Shaw, a CNN anchor, asked, referring to the Massachusetts governor's wife. Dukakis said he wouldn't favor it because "I don't see any evidence that it is a deterrent." The technocratic, largely emotionless response in a debate mere weeks before the election marked the nadir of Democrats' politically agonized relationship to the death penalty — reinforcing in some voters' minds that the party was soft on crime. President George H.W. Bush went on to crush Dukakis, winning the Electoral College vote, 426-111. Four years later, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton projected the opposite message, defending the death penalty on a New Hampshire debate stage, then leaving the campaign trail to return to his home state and preside ov...

Robert and Michael visited the White House in 1953 in a failed bid to get President Eisenhower to stop their parents’ executions. More than 60 years after the execution of alleged spy Ethel Rosenberg, a former governor of Massachusetts has endorsed a campaign to exonerate her. Rosenberg and her husband, Julius, of New York, were put to death by electric chair in 1953 for conspiring to pass secrets about the atomic bomb to the Soviets. Other alleged co-conspirators served prison sentences after cooperating with prosecutors. The Rosenbergs' convictions and executions remain controversial, with supporters saying the evidence was weak and the Rosenbergs were victims of Cold War hysteria. The couple's sons, Robert and Michael Meeropol, were 6 and 10 years old at the time. Now 69 and 73, they are asking the U.S. Department of Justice and President Obama to definitively state that their mother was innocent. "An enormous body of evidence ... demonstrates that...