Chicago, Feb 7: Joe Biden, the first sitting US president to openly oppose the death penalty, has discussed the possibility of instructing the Department of Justice to stop scheduling new executions, officials have told The Associated Press.
If he does, that would end an extraordinary run of executions by the federal government, all during a pandemic that raged inside prison walls and infected journalists, federal employees and even those put to death.
The officials had knowledge of the private discussions with Biden but were not authorized to speak publicly about them. White House press secretary Jen Psaki, when asked Friday about Biden’s plans on the death penalty, said she had nothing to preview on the issue.
Action to stop scheduling new executions could take immediate pressure off Biden from opponents of the death penalty. But they want him to go much further, from bulldozing the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, to striking the death penalty from U.S. statutes entirely.
While the coronavirus pandemic and election coverage dominated the news last year, many Americans who paid close attention to the resumption of federal executions under President Donald Trump were dismayed by their scale and the apparent haste to carry them out.
The executions, beginning July 14 and ending four days before Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, were the first federal executions in 17 years. More were held in the last six months under Trump than in the previous 56 years combined.
Executions went ahead for inmates whose lawyers claimed were too mentally ill or intellectually disabled to fully grasp why they were being put to death. Lawyers for Lisa Montgomery, convicted of killing a pregnant Missouri woman and cutting out her baby, said her mental illness was partly triggered by years of horrific sexual abuse as a child.
On Jan. 13, she became the first woman executed federally in nearly 70 years.
Biden can guarantee no federal executions during his presidency by simply telling the Justice Department never to schedule any. But that would not prevent a future president who supports capital punishment from restarting them. Barack
Obama, for whom Biden served as vice president, did place an informal moratorium on carrying federal executions out when he was president, ordering a review of execution methods in 2014 after a botched state execution in Oklahoma. But Obama never took any steps toward ending federal executions for good. (AP)
