End the federal killing spree

Joe Biden, once in office, will have the power to put a quick halt to one facet of the Trump/Barr drive to further embed cruelty and retribution in our political fabric. Such a move would stir up howls from the vengeance caucus, but it would make us a better country.

Countdown in a San Francisco window. Accurate as of January 1.

According to Andrew Cohen of the Marshall Project, writing at the Brennan Center for Justice, a president can halt activations of the federal death penalty which before Trump had sat unused for 16 years.

The Trump administration’s decision to execute five condemned federal prisoners during the presidential transition — an unprecedented killing spree — stems from the same blunt theory of governance that saw Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refuse to hold a Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Merrick Garland in 2016 while rushing to confirm Amy Coney Barrett earlier this year.

In each instance, those with power eschewed cherished norms and political comity and used it. Their right to do these things gave them the might to do it, you could say, regardless of what the rest of us thought about it all.

In a little over four weeks, Joe Biden will have that same power to write his own history with capital punishment in America. The central question is whether he has the political will and moral strength to exercise the power. He can empty federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, by commuting to life-without-parole terms the death sentences of the 50 or so people left on it. He can direct the Justice Department to instruct each and every U.S. attorney around the country not to pursue capital charges for federal crimes. He can order the completion of a death penalty study disappointingly left unfinished during the Obama administration.

Very gradually, this country has been learning that demanding the government kill terrible offenders for us neither creates moral satisfaction nor justice. Our legal processes are riddled with inequities that ensure that poor and dark defendants never get the kind of fairness that rich and white people can buy. The requirement that juries in death penalty cases be made of people who state a willingness to apply the ultimate sanction undermines any potential for understanding and mercy. The tangle of legal safeguards that we've added to a bad system to try to minimize its racism and class bias merely drag out an inherently inequitable, over-complex, expensive, and drearily lengthy process.

Before the Trump/Barr killing spree, we were backing away from capital punishment. According to the AP:

Colorado in 2020 became the 22nd state to strike death-penalty laws from its books. Currently, 34 states have either abolished the death penalty or not carried out executions in a decade or more even though their laws permit them, the report said. This year, Louisiana and Utah passed the 10-year mark of no executions.

Historically, it has been mostly the states, not the feds, that executed. The death penalty degrades us all. Joe Biden can walk the federal government back from this misbegotten relic.