During Trump’s final days it was reported that he and Bill Barr were speeding up federal executions to kill as many people as possible before he left office. (I wrote about it here.)He and Bill Barr had gleefully reinstated the federal death penalty and were afraid they’d leave some possible victims alive if they didn’t move quickly.
By 9:27 p.m. Bernard was dead. In that moment, he became the ninth of 13 people executed in the final six months of the Trump administration — more federal executions than in the previous 10 administrations combined. Of the 13, six were put to death after Trump lost the election, his Justice Department accelerating the schedule to ensure they would die before the incoming administration could intercede. Before Trump, there had been only three federal executions since 1963; in January 2021, Trump oversaw three executions during a single four-day stretch
Two years before that stretch, Trump had signed perhaps the lone broadly popular major initiative of his presidency: a bipartisan criminal-justice reform bill. By 2020, however, his political calculus had changed. As he geared up for another election, Trump White House sources say, the president was telling advisers that carrying out capital punishment would insulate him from criticism that he was soft on crime. And in his attorney general, Bill Barr, a longtime death-penalty advocate, he had the perfect accomplice.
The executions, carried out in the name of law and order, took place at a time of peak lawlessness within the White House. While his administration killed prisoners at an unprecedented clip, Trump spent his final months attempting to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in the Jan. 6 ransacking of the U.S. Capitol. And though Trump did show some mercy on his way out the door, it was largely reserved for political cronies such as Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.
The killing spree ended with Trump’s first term, as President Biden suspended capital punishment on the federal level, but it may only have been a pause. The former president is running again — and opened his 2024 campaign with a speech that promised more executions if he wins: “We’re going to be asking [for] everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts,” Trump said in his November campaign announcement. “Because it is the only way.”
Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for the death penalty dates back decades. His first real foray into politics was a public call for executions after five teenagers of color were arrested in the brutal rape and assault of a female jogger in New York City in 1989. “bring back the death penalty. bring back our police,” screamed a full-page ad Trump had placed in the New York Daily News at the time. The Central Park Five, as the young men came to be known, were later exonerated by DNA evidence, after they had served years in prison. But Trump never apologized for the ad.
By the time he was preparing for his first presidential run, Trump was pitching capital punishment to the American people again. In a May 2015 appearance on Fox & Friends, responding to the killing of two police officers in Mississippi, Trump said the death penalty should be “brought back strong.” Once in office, he suggested it as a potential remedy to the nation’s opioid crisis, a tool that could be used against dealers as a deterrent. (“If you shoot one person, they give you the death penalty,” he said. “These people can kill 2,000, 3,000 people, and nothing happens to them.”)
His public statements on the topic were a nudge to the Justice Department, and Trump’s chief law-enforcement officers took note. In 2018, his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, began the process of lifting the two-decade, unofficial moratorium on federal executions by issuing a memo that urged federal prosecutors to use existing death-penalty statutes against drug traffickers. But it was Sessions’ successor, Barr, who took the concrete step in July 2019 of ordering the Federal Bureau of Prisons to resume executions.
Barr wrote proudly of the decision in his book One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, published about a year after the Trump presidency ended, devoting a whole chapter — “Bringing Justice to Violent Predators” — to the blitz of federal executions. Not a shocking move from a man who, while George H.W. Bush’s attorney general in the early 1990s, praised the death penalty in a series of official recommendations, claiming that it works as a deterrent, “permanently incapacitate[s] extremely violent offenders,” and “serves the important societal goal of just retribution.” (Without a hint of irony, he added, “It reaffirms society’s moral outrage at the wanton destruction of innocent human life.”)
Trump, of course, was not so keen to engage with the subject intellectually. The sum total of his discussions of the death penalty with his top law-enforcement officer, Barr says, was a single, offhand conversation. After an unrelated White House meeting, Barr was preparing to leave the Oval Office when, he says, he gave Trump a “heads-up” that “we would be resuming the death penalty.” Trump — apparently unaware of his own AG’s longstanding philosophy on capital punishment — asked Barr if he personally supported the death penalty and why.
Trump’s lack of interest in the details had grave repercussions for the people whose fates were in his hands. According to multiple sources inside the administration, Trump completely disregarded the advice of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, an administrative body designed to administer impartial pleas for clemency in death-penalty cases and other, lower-level offenses. And Barr says he does not recall discussing any of the 13 inmates who were eventually killed with the president who sent them to the death chamber.
That means Trump never talked with Barr about Lisa Montgomery, a deeply mentally ill and traumatized person who became the first woman executed by the federal government since 1953. Or Wesley Ira Purkey, whose execution was delayed a day by a judge who ruled that his advancing Alzheimer’s disease had left Purkey unaware of why he was being executed. (The Supreme Court reversed that ruling the next day.) Or Daniel Lewis Lee, Dustin Lee Honken, Lezmond Charles Mitchell, Keith Dwayne Nelson, William Emmett LeCroy Jr., Christopher Andre Vialva, Orlando Cordia Hall, Alfred Bourgeois, Corey Johnson, and Dustin John Higgs.
Trump loves the death penalty. He said so many times. He just wishes it could happen faster. Summary execution is his preferred method. Trials are a silly waste of time.
Merrick Garland ended the barbaric practice upon taking office, thankfully.