The president’s executive order “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” issued on the day he assumed office, repeals the federal moratorium on executions, expands the death penalty, and is designed to reverse the progress that has been made in slowing down, and in some places ending, the killing of those imprisoned by the state.
The arguments he made in his multi-part order to justify expanding the death penalty are simply false and contradict what we know years of empirical evidence, and research have shown:
- The president claims that capital punishment is an essential tool for deterring heinous crimes. Extensive studies have repeatedly shown that killing prisoners does not have a deterrent effect and that it actually has a brutalizing effect on the community at large.
- He claims that capital punishment is for the benefit of American citizens. This is a racist dog whistle. It reinforces the empirical fact that capital punishment is more likely to be used where the victim is white and the accused is not.
- He states that his order will “counteract the politicians and judges who subvert the law by obstructing and preventing” This blatant authoritarian claim falsely elevates the executive branch as superior to the legislative branch, which represents the will of the people, and superior to the judicial branch, which interprets the law and the Constitution. Neither is the case.
- He disregards states’ rights by ordering the Attorney General to evaluate whether the 37 men on federal death row whose sentences were commuted by President Biden could be prosecuted and executed under state law.
- He also ordered the AG to “evaluate the places of imprisonment and conditions of confinement” for each of the 37 men to take all “lawful and appropriate action to ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose,” which could violate their civil rights.
Last week, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the head of the Bureau of Prisons to withdraw its current federal drug protocol, which calls for the use of pentobarbital, because of “significant uncertainty about whether the method avoid unnecessary pain,” Law Dork exclusively reported https://www.lawdork.com/p/garland-withdraws-federal-execution-drug-protocol.
Without a drug protocol, the federal government cannot execute people on its death row.
The protocol that established lethal injection as the official federal method for execution was adopted in July 2019 and was the blueprint for the 13 executions carried out by then-President Trump and then-Attorney General William Barr between July 2020 and January 2021.
Not surprisingly, one of the president’s executive orders implicitly dismisses Garland’s concerns by directing the attorney general to “take all necessary and lawful action to ensure that each state that allows capital punishment has a sufficient supply of drugs needed to carry out lethal injection.”
The administration is also training its sights on transgender rights. In his order https://tinyurl.com/yc6ur4mt , “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” the president states that:
- The government “will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.”
- “The attorney general shall ensure that the Bureau of Prisons revises its policies concerning medical care to be consistent with this order, and shall ensure that no Federal funds are expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”
- Agencies must implement regulations forcing transgender women to be housed with men in prisons and other correctional facilities.
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