In July 2020, executions at the state level were put on hold in the U.S. because of COVID-19. However, shortly thereafter the federal government said deadly pandemic be damned and moved forward with executions. But that wasn’t enough to satiate the blood thirst and soon after his election loss in November Donald Trump gave his okay to expanding methods by which federal executions can be carried out; Trump’s executions now can be by firing squad and hanging and gas chamber and electrocution and lethal injection.
It is worth noting that no administration in over one hundred years – not since Grover Cleveland’s first term in 1888-1889 – has any president carried out multiple executions during the transition period.
By the end of 2020, the federal government under Donald Trump will have “conducted more civilian executions in five months than any other presidency in the 20th or 21st centuries, performed the first executions by a lame-duck president in more than a century, and scheduled more executions than had ever occurred in a presidential transition period in the history of the United States.” Read: “The Death Penalty in 2020: Year End Report”. About the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).
A few stand-out points in the ‘Year End Report’:
- The racial disparities exhibited in this year’s executions remain consistent with decadeslong trends, with almost half of the defendants executed being people of color – and 76% of the executions for the deaths of white victims.
- Every prisoner executed this year was age 21 or younger at the offense or had at
least one of the following impairments: significant evidence of mental illness (8);
evidence of brain injury, developmental brain damage, or an IQ in the intellectually
disabled range (6); chronic serious childhood trauma, neglect, and/or abuse (14). - Five people were exonerated from death row in 2020, bringing the number of
people exonerated from death row to 172 since 1973. In each of the five cases,
prosecutorial misconduct contributed to the wrongful conviction. - Problematic federal executions included the first ever federal execution of a Native
American for a crime on tribal land, in violation of Native sovereignty; the first
federal executions of teenage offenders in 78 years; executions of individuals with
intellectual disability or serious mental illness; and the first federal execution in 57
years for a crime committed in a state that had abolished the death penalty.
“Racism has always infected the use of the death penalty and this year is no exception. The
death penalty — as the most severe punishment — must be part of the efforts to address
racism in the criminal legal system as a whole” – Ngozi Ndulue, DPIC’s Senior Director
of Research and Special Projects.
