\n<\/p>\n
Donald Trump has been forthright about his intention to bring about a death-penalty renaissance, and now his efforts are coming to fruition. This year has been a particularly lethal one for America\u2019s death-row prisoners. Together, Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have executed a total of 40 people in the past 10 months by injection, nitrogen hypoxia, and firing squad, surpassing 2024\u2019s total of 25\u2014a significant spike in an otherwise-downward long-term trend. Trump\u2019s return to power\u2014and the Republican Party\u2019s resurgence more generally\u2014is driving a heavy push for more death sentences and more executions. He has restored the federal death penalty following the prior administration\u2019s moratorium, and Republican state legislatures have sought to expand the list of crimes punishable by death and to allow new execution methods.<\/p>\n
Capital punishment is central to Trump\u2019s authoritarian approach to criminal justice. His pro\u2013death penalty views emerged decades before he ascended to the presidency. In 1989, he bought full-page advertisements in The New York Times<\/em>, the New York Daily News<\/em>, the New York Post<\/em>, and New York Newsday<\/em> calling for the alleged perpetrators of a gang rape in Central Park to be sentenced to death. In the text of his ad, Trump blasted Ed Koch, the New York City mayor at the time, for being soft on crime, both spiritually and practically. \u201cMayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts,\u201d Trump wrote. \u201cI do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.\u201d He repeated the ad\u2019s headline\u2014\u201cBRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY AND BRING BACK OUR POLICE!\u201d\u2014by way of conclusion above a now-familiar signature. The five men accused of the Central Park gang rape were later exonerated.<\/p>\n When Trump arrived at the White House, federal executions had not been carried out in more than 17 years\u2014a hiatus Trump promptly dispensed with, presiding over 13 executions in the last several months of his first term. Joe Biden, clearly troubled by those events, issued commutations to 37 of 40 people on federal death row during his last weeks in office, which prevented Trump from picking up where he left off when he returned to the White House. Trump responded furiously online: \u201cAs soon as I am inaugurated,\u201d he swore on Truth Social, \u201cI will direct the Justice Department to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters. We will be a Nation of Law and Order again!\u201d He did just that. On January 20, Trump signed an executive order intended to reinvigorate the death penalty both federally and at the state level, instructing his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to pursue federal death sentences when possible, and to encourage and assist states in carrying out executions.<\/p>\n On cue, several states set about realizing Trump\u2019s dreams, Florida chief among them. Under the direction of Governor Ron DeSantis, the state has carried out a record 14 executions so far in 2025, with plans for more before the year is over. Maria DeLiberato, the executive director of the nonprofit organization Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, told me that this pace of executions is unprecedented in Florida\u2019s recent history, and that DeSantis has now ordered more executions in a single year than any other governor in Florida history.<\/p>\n DeSantis has also overseen efforts to alter Florida\u2019s death-penalty statutes to require mandatory death sentences for any undocumented person convicted of a capital crime, signing a bill in February that would wrest the decision away from juries. Last month, Florida\u2019s attorney general, James Uthmeier, wrote a letter to Bondi and White House counsel Dave Warrington asking Bondi to fight to overturn the Supreme Court\u2019s 2008 decision in Kennedy v.<\/em> Louisiana<\/em>, which held that pedophilic sex offenders could not be sentenced to die unless their crimes either resulted or were intended to result in the death of their victims. Doing so would expand capital crimes to include categories other than murder, creating new avenues for states to pursue death sentences. \u201cWe have every confidence that, with President Trump\u2019s strong leadership and with principled, rule-of-law Justices on the Supreme Court,\u201d the letter reads, \u201cchild rapists can be appropriately punished for their unspeakable crimes.\u201d Officials from 15 states co-signed.<\/p>\n The Constitution prohibits \u201ccruel and unusual punishments,\u201d but states attempting to rack up executions and death sentences can be reasonably sure that the Supreme Court will not stop them. \u201cThere has been a clear signal from the Trump Supreme Court that it will not be enforcing constitutional guarantees in death-penalty cases,\u201d Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, told me, citing this Court\u2019s unwillingness to intervene in states\u2019 efforts to pursue executions using arguably cruel and unusual methods. Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, pointed to the decline in stays of execution issued by the Supreme Court this year relative to prior years as another sign of this Court\u2019s friendly posture toward capital punishment. \u201cThe Supreme Court has stepped way back from its historical role in regulating use of the death penalty in the states and staying executions where they are troubled by the circumstances,\u201d Maher said. Alabama\u2019s execution of Anthony Boyd last week is a clear example: Though Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in a dissent joined by Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson that Boyd\u2019s execution via nitrogen suffocation would likely be torturous, the Court declined to entertain his final appeal. Sotomayor was nevertheless proved right, as Boyd\u2019s execution became the most protracted nitrogen execution in history.<\/p>\n In this permissive environment, efforts are already under way to resurrect the death penalty in jurisdictions that have previously suspended or banned it. Trump has announced plans to revive capital punishment in Washington, D.C., despite the fact that the practice was abolished by the city council in 1981, and residents later overwhelmingly rejected a 1992 referendum to reinstate capital punishment within its borders. When Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was stabbed to death on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, in August, Trump weighed in to demand the perpetrator be sentenced to death, though North Carolina has not carried out an execution in 17 years. \u201cThe ANIMAL who so violently killed the beautiful young lady from Ukraine, who came to America searching for peace and safety, should be given a \u2018Quick\u2019 (there is no doubt!) Trial, and only awarded THE DEATH PENALTY. There can be no other option!!!\u201d Legislators in North Carolina got the message, and swiftly passed a sweeping piece of legislation titled \u201cIryna\u2019s Law\u201d aimed in part in resuming executions and expediting the state\u2019s death-penalty-appeals process. \u201cWhat\u2019s happened this year is that the Trump administration has attempted to open the floodgates when it comes to executions,\u201d Dunham told me. Considering the success it has had in just the first nine months of Trump\u2019s second term, the worst may be yet to come.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s abiding interest in capital punishment is not incidental to his overall politics, but seems rather to be an expression of several of his apparent animating impulses: his will to achieve profound and concentrated personal power, for one, and his tendency to channel the conservative id, for another. Trump\u2019s political project is unabashedly authoritarian, as is evident in the prosecution of his enemies, his battles with the free press, and his deployment of the military in major American cities. He seems intent on suppressing the elements of society he considers unfit or dysgenic, and the death penalty maximally empowers heads of state to control civilian populations\u2014which is why countries that still practice executions tend to have authoritarian governments, as in Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea. \u201cThe death penalty has always been political,\u201d Maher told me. \u201cIf you look back through history, we have thousands of years of examples of how the death penalty is used by different regimes to repress dissent or to punish opposition.\u201d And Trump\u2019s demands for capital punishment appear closely entwined with his political ambitions. After the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was murdered last month, Trump called for the death penalty before law enforcement even had a suspect in custody, and later said at Kirk\u2019s memorial service, \u201cI hate my opponent, and I don\u2019t want the best for them,\u201d an echo of his 1989 screed against Ed Koch.<\/p>\n Predicting how far Trump is willing to go to create a more lethal justice system is difficult. If he intends to rely on popular support for his mission, he might find that public opinion about the death penalty does not match his zeal. In 2024, capital punishment merited a 53 percent approval rating\u2014a 50-year low, which suggests that the American people may be less interested in the death penalty than their elected representatives are.<\/p>\n But perhaps that won\u2019t matter: The spike in executions could represent a temporary increase brought about by a political fad, or an omen of an even more brutal future. Trump has allegedly mused in the past about group or televised executions. And though people frustrated with the secrecy surrounding American executions occasionally suggest that if the goings-on inside death chambers were better known, then people would reject the practice, I suspect that significant portions of the public would enjoy the exhibition. When public executions were common, they were widely attended, and I see no reason to believe humans have generally improved in moral quality since those days. The worst-case scenario is that Trump manages to whet the public\u2019s appetite for executions either by featuring them prominently in his rhetoric or by escalating them to spectacles, thereby fashioning a revival in popular demand from his own private fixation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Donald Trump has been forthright about his intention to bring about a death-penalty renaissance, and now his efforts are coming to fruition. This year has been a particularly lethal one for America\u2019s death-row prisoners. Together, Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have executed a total of 40 people<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30867,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[2822,13080,376,226,4749],"class_list":{"0":"post-30866","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-age","9":"tag-beginning","10":"tag-death","11":"tag-golden","12":"tag-penalty"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}