The Daily Beast reports:
There have been many predictions—from instigating nuclear war to pardoning Joe Exotic—about what President Donald Trump might do during his final months in office, but it’s fair to say few people guessed this. According to a report from ProPublica, Trump is trying to rush through a proposed regulation that could see federal executions being carried out by firing squads again. The proposed rule cleared White House review on Nov. 6, according to the report, so it could be finalized any day. However, the archaic method may never be used—all five scheduled federal executions are expected to be carried out with lethal injection, and President-elect Joe Biden opposes the death penalty.
Yes, they are racing to kill five federal prisoners before Trump leaves office. I’m sure they are very disappointed they won’t be able to use the electric chair or the firing squad for their ritualistic murders. (You know they would prefer lynching or maybe something really fun like beheading or drawing and quartering but the damn PC police won’t allow it.)
Slate reports:
This bloodthirsty decision is another and particularly grotesque way in which President Donald Trump and his Justice Department are defying the norms and conventions for modern presidential transitions.
The Death Penalty Information Center reports that the last time an outgoing administration did anything remotely similar was more than a century ago, in 1889. At that time Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat to be elected president after the Civil War and the only president ever to have served as an executioner (when he was the sheriff in Erie County, New York), permitted three executions to proceed in the period between his electoral defeat and Benjamin Harrison’s inauguration in March 1889.
Since then, every outgoing administration has halted the federal death penalty during the transition period. Trump and Attorney General William Barr are not merely failing to engage in a merciful pause: They are rushing to execute persons who might be spared by a new administration.
Indeed, the Biden administration intends to try to abolish the federal death penalty and provide incentives for states to abolish it as well. A spokesperson reaffirmed this intention on Saturday: “The president-elect opposes the death penalty, now and in the future, and as president will work to end its use.”
The changing nature of America’s death penalty politics is also reflected in the fact that the number of executions carried out at the state level has declined to the lowest number since 1983. This year, even the most pro–death penalty states have to some degree recognized the significant health risks associated with carrying out executions during the pandemic and stopped them. All told, seven men have been executed in five different states (Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas), with South Carolina scheduled to carry out one more before the end of the year.
At the same time, the Trump administration has moved full speed ahead with the federal death penalty. Trump and Barr have ignored the threat of COVID-19 and gone ahead with executions, forcing lawyers, religious advisers, and victims’ family members to risk their health if they choose to be present.
They carried out seven executions in a three-month period last summer. If all goes according to the administration’s newly announced plan, it will make history in yet another way.
It will be the first time that the federal government ends up carrying out more executions (10) in a single year than are carried out in all the states which retain capital punishment (8). Those 10 executions would be the most carried out by the federal government since 1896, when Cleveland’s second administration put 16 people to death.
I guess a quarter of a million corpses just isn’t enough to satisfy them.