Death Penalty News

Last year, an unprecedented spate of executions by the U.S. federal government—ordered and administered by then-president Donald J. Trump and his Catholic attorney general, William Barr—claimed the lives of 12 men and one woman. It also exposed many of the moral concerns and systemic breakdowns endemic to the use of the death penalty. Aside from being an obvious affront to those who respect human life, these killings ended a deepening consensus against the federal use of the death penalty. Before Daniel Lewis Lee’s execution on July 14, 2020, it had been 17 years since the federal government had last carried out an execution. This de facto moratorium on executions lasted through all of President Barack Obama’s time in office and most of the administration of George W. Bush. In other words, there was nothing to necessitate the Trump administration’s pursuit of executions outside of its own thirst for vengeance. At the same time, the death penalty in the United States last year was in a ...

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...

The Federal Court upheld the death penalty imposed on two Iranians and a local construction worker for drug trafficking today. The Federal Court today held that judges hearing drug trafficking cases could rely on presumptions and inferences to determine if the prosecution had established a prima facie case against accused persons. Chief Justice Tengku Maimun Tuan Mat, who led a 7-member bench, said the panel had traced the legislative history of Section 180 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CPC), in particular the amendments made in 1997 and 2006. “We find that the purpose of Section 180(4) of the CPC was not to exclude the use of presumptions, inferences or anything other than direct evidence to establish a prima facie case,” she said. Rather, she said, the purpose of Section 180(4) was to clarify Parliament’s intention for the threshold to be applied at the close of the prosecution’s case. Tengku Maimun, who delivered the unanimous judgment, said this in dismissing...