19 hours Ago By Olivia Ensign
The United States surpassed a horrific and unforgivable milestone in late September. With five prisoners executed in one week, the U.S.
marked 1,600 executions since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Nine U.S.
states have carried out 25 executions this year alone. Despite the trend toward the abolition of the death penalty worldwide, the U.S.
stubbornly clings to a practice that is not only outdated and inhumane but also deeply flawed and unjust. President Joe Biden today moved the needle toward justice, commuting the federal death sentences of 37 men, taking a vital step toward addressing the cruelty, arbitrariness and bias embedded in the capital punishment system. In one day, Biden commuted more death sentences than any president before him, but he fell short of his 2020 campaign promise to end the death penalty at the federal level and incentivize states to do the same.
Biden left three prisoners on federal death row – Robert Bowers, sentenced to death for the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh; Dylann Roof, sentenced to death for the 2015 mass shooting at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, sentenced to death for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Biden still has the opportunity to show moral leadership by opposing the death penalty under any circumstances and commuting their sentences, too. Austin Sarat Dec.
18, 2024 Before President-elect Donald Trump’s first term, the federal government had executed three people in the previous six decades. But Trump resumed executions , with 12 men and one woman put to death during his final months in office. The same systemic injustices that taint federal death sentences – racial bias, prosecutorial misconduct, wrongful convictions and more – also taint the cases of some 2,200 men and women on state death rows across the United States, according to figures from the Death Penalty Information Center .
Biden’s commutation today sets an example for state leaders to follow. They must put an end to this inhumane practice once and for all and align the U.S.
with global human rights standards . We stand at a moral crossroads: to perpetuate a system that is riddled with bias and error or to make a stand for justice and human rights. Many states have recognized the profound moral, legal and social costs of capital punishment.
In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order that placed a moratorium on the death penalty in California and immediately dismantled the state’s execution chamber. In 2021, Virginia became the first southern state to abolish the death penalty.
In North Carolina , advocates are urging Gov. Roy Cooper to commute the sentences of those currently on death row before he leaves office in January. Globally, more than two-thirds of countries have abolished or ceased executions , recognizing that capital punishment violates the right to life and the prohibition against cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights .
The U.S. remains an outlier, aligning itself with such bedfellows as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia in continuing this barbaric and outdated practice.
The death penalty is not just a relic of an inhumane past but a glaring contradiction of the values of fairness and justice that the U.S. champions.
Marginalized communities and those without access to adequate legal defense are disproportionately condemned to death. Studies show that people of color , especially Black defendants , are even more likely to be sentenced to death and executed when the victim is white . Racial bias is just one of the many systemic flaws that plague the death penalty.
Another is the risk of executing innocent people. The recent case of Marcellus Williams in Missouri serves as a stark reminder of this possible danger. Marc M.
Howard Sept. 27, 2024 The state of Missouri executed Williams on Sept. 24 despite the fact that none of the forensic evidence at the crime scene matched him, and the county’s top prosecutor called for his conviction to be overturned .
His case is not an anomaly; numerous studies show wrongful convictions in death penalty cases are disturbingly common. For every eight people executed in the U.S.
since 1973, one person is exonerated . This is not justice; it is a system that gambles with human lives, often with tragic results. Its defenders contend the death penalty is a deterrent , but there is no reliable evidence of this.
What is clear is that the death penalty is costly , arbitrary and profoundly unjust. It perpetuates cycles of violence and retribution, rather than offering the opportunity for rehabilitation and redemption. Leaders across the country have a tremendous opportunity now to advocate to end the death penalty and ensure that the U.
S. moves toward justice and fairness. This is about who we are as a nation and what we stand for.
The clock is ticking, and the lives of those who remain on death row – along with the moral fabric of our nation – hang in the balance. Terrance Sullivan is director of racial justice at Amnesty International USA, part of the world’s oldest, largest grassroots human rights organization. Olivia Ensign is the senior advocate and researcher at the U.
S. program of Human Rights Watch, a global nonprofit organization that investigates and reports on abuses worldwide..
