Trump 2.0
Donald Trump’s euphemistically named “Justice Department” conducted thirteen executions during his single term, five of them taking place after he lost the 2020 election. Many occurred well after warrant deadlines had passed, and details subsequently came to light demonstrating that officials had cut corners and relied on a Supreme Court that had rarely seen an execution it couldn’t rubberstamp. At least one lethal injection – of 19-year-old non-shooter Brandon Bernard - occurred when Trump himself felt there might be valid reasons not to proceed. That was then.
Now we’ve been granted a warped vision of a possible future. A 2023 Heritage Foundation document entitled Mandate For Leadership, Project 2025 reveals that should Trump be reelected, the plan is for more of the same. Much more. The book is written for “the next conservative administration,” but is in essence an homage to Trump, mentioning him reverently more than 300 times while criticizing Biden even more. Since many of the contributors were officials in the last Trump administration, it is not a reach to suggest that Project 2025 is a roadmap for the next Trump administration; and while most of us can’t yet contemplate such a possibility, we have at least been given a nightmarish window to look through. Here is their suggested approach to capital punishment:
Enforce the death penalty where appropriate and applicable. Capital punishment is a sensitive matter, as it should be, but the current crime wave makes deterrence vital at the federal, state, and local levels. However, providing this punishment without ever enforcing it provides justice neither for the victims’ families nor for the defendant. The next conservative Administration should therefore do everything possible to obtain finality for the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row. It should also pursue the death penalty for applicable crimes—particularly heinous crimes involving violence and sexual abuse of children—until Congress says otherwise through legislation.
We should start with the two lies that underpin this approach. First, there is no crime wave – overall crime actually dropped 10% in the first quarter of 2023 from the first quarter of 2022 (and have you ever wondered why right-wing media always sees a “crime wave” during Democratic administrations?). The second lie, of course, is the long-standing canard that the death penalty deters – there is no evidence of this, but that won’t stop the Heritage Foundation.
Lies are to be expected, of course; and this blog would hardly be worth writing simply to catalogue fake news. Nor would it be blog-worthy to point out that the “conservative” Heritage Foundation wants the United States Supreme Court to overrule fundamental precedent and expand the death penalty to include cases in which no one even died, let alone requiring an intent to kill. And even Big Brother might have trouble espousing the idea that “enforcing [a death sentence] provides justice...for the defendant.”
Let’s talk instead about the use of overtly fascist language to encourage the use of capital punishment. Project 2025 urges the government to “(d)o everything possible to obtain finality for the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row.” Can it be that the Heritage/Trump administration writers are afraid to say that we should strap the entire federal death row down and inject them with poison? That would certainly achieve finality. But their expressed goal is even more insidious than their repulsive semantics: never mind the possibility of misconduct, or that there might be a meritorious appeal issue, or that a fundamental mistake could be detected, the administration should “do everything possible” to execute achieve finality for all prisoners on the federal death row.