During his first term, Trump oversaw a series of federal executions unparalleled in modern history.
US President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to increase the use of the death penalty during his second term in office, saying he would take action against “rapists, murderers and monsters”.
Trump’s announcement on Tuesday came on the heels of the outgoing president Joe Biden used his presidential pardon powers to reduce the sentences of almost all federal death row prisoners to life in prison without parole.
“Once in office, I will direct the Department of Justice to vigorously enforce the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers and monsters,” Trump said in a social media post. “We will be a nation of law and order again!”
During his first term, Trump resumed federal executions after a nearly 20-year hiatus and oversaw the executions of 13 people. This number was higher than any other president in modern history.
While the people of the US continue to support this capital punishment According to Gallup polls, this support for crimes like murder is at its lowest level in decades, falling from 80 percent in 1994 to 53 percent in 2024. Over the same period, opposition has risen from 16 percent to 43 percent.
Death penalty advocates say the death penalty can provide family members of victims of violent crimes with a sense of seclusion and deter crime, although studies have found little evidence of the latter.
“The pain and trauma we have endured over the last seven years has been indescribable,” Heather Turner, whose mother was killed in a 2017 bank robbery in Conway, South Carolina, said in a social media post she sharply criticized Biden’s decision.
Opponents say innocent people have been wrongly executed before they are exonerated, that the process of executing a person is lengthy and costly, and that the death penalty has been disproportionately used against people of color.
During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump relied heavily on nativist attacks on immigrants that portrayed them as dangerous criminals and said he would do so demand the death penalty for undocumented immigrants who commit crimes such as murder and rape against U.S. citizens.
Immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than people born in the United States, immigrant rights groups see dark undertones in Trump’s fixation on immigrant violence.
The three federal prisoners on death row whose sentences Biden refused to commute were all found guilty of hate crimes.
They are Dylan Roofwho killed nine black parishioners at Mother Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina in 2015; 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Robert Bowers, who carried out the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history when he shot and killed 17 community members Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, killing 11 people.
