President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday night calling for the dramatic expansion of the use of the federal death penalty.
The directive calls on the attorney general to pursue the federal death penalty “for all crimes of a severity demanding its use,” particularly in cases involving the killing of law enforcement officers and capital crimes “committed by an alien illegally present in this country.”
Trump frequently blames immigrants for violent crime in the U.S., despitestudies showing that they are not more likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes. During campaign rallies, Trump described migrants as “animals” who were “poisoning the blood of our country” ― dehumanizing language that isreminiscent of Nazi rhetoric.
The executive order also calls for the “Overruling of Supreme Court Precedents That Hinder Capital Punishment,” likely a reference to Supreme Court rulings in 1977 and 2008 that held that carrying out the death penalty for rape would violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint for Trump’s second term, called for using the death penalty in cases involving violence toward or sexual abuse of children. In a footnote, the author wrote that this would require the Supreme Court to overrule itself, “but the [Justice] department should place a priority on doing so.”
During the 2008 case, which involved the rape of a child, several groups for survivors of sexual assault urged against the death penalty, arguing it would interfere with young victims’ healing process. The case ended in a 5-4 decision; three of the four justices who voted to allow the death penalty as punishment for child sexual assault are still on the Supreme Court, as well as three additional conservative justices. Last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill allowing the death penalty in state child rape convictions.
In the final six months of Trump’s first presidency, his administration ended a de facto 17-year moratorium on federal executions andkilled 13 people. In 2021, Joe Biden’s administration reinstated the moratorium, but Biden fell short of hiscampaign promise to work with Congress to abolish the federal death penalty. Shortly before leaving office, Bidencommuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row to life imprisonment, limiting Trump’s ability to immediately carry out another killing spree.
Trump accused Biden of making a “mockery of justice” and “insult[ing] the victims of these horrible crimes,” despite the fact that some victims supported clemency. The executive order directs the attorney general to evaluate whether the 37 people whose federal death sentences were commuted under Biden can be charged with state capital crimes. Even in the states that still allow death sentences, it would be difficult to re-prosecute decades-old cases.
We Won’t Back Down
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.
The executive order also instructs the attorney general to “evaluate the places of imprisonment and conditions of confinement” for each of the 37 people whose death sentences were commuted and to take action to ensure their conditions are “consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.” The implication that the individuals removed from death row are now serving their life sentences under cushy conditions is baseless. Last year, government watchdog agencies reported hundreds of preventable deaths and the overuse of solitary confinement in federal prisons.
With a nearly empty federal death row, Trump directed the attorney general to help states continue to carry out executions by taking “all necessary and lawful action to ensure that each state that allows capital punishment has a sufficient supply of drugs needed to carry out lethal injection.”
Several states that allow capital punishment have shifted away from executions, in part because of difficulty obtaining lethal injection drugs.