The revival of the Death Penalty
For the record:
I have been opposed to the death penalty because innocent people have been executed. If, as most conservatives and liberals would say, life is precious. If you are a Christian, it is covered by "Thou Shalt Not Kill"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-trump-administrations-revival-of-federal-executions-is-a-cynical-election-year-move/ar-AAERtcQ
Rolling Stone via MSN
The Trump Administration’s Revival of Federal Executions Is a Cynical Election-Year Move
July 26, 2019
Andrew Cohen
The only surprising part of the Trump administration’s choice to restart federal executions is that it took the president this long to make it. As a matter of pure politics, Donald Trump would probably like nothing more than to have a national debate over the next year about what sort of justice ought to be meted out to convicted murderers. Such a dialogue during the primary season will likely rile his base, track his “American carnage” motif, and distract reporters away from coverage of the administration’s malfeasance and the president’s own legal troubles.
The Trump administration quietly until now has been increasing the rate of federal capital cases, a policy entirely consistent both with Trump’s own odious views of the death penalty and the views of both of the attorneys general who have served in this administration. Like Trump, Jeff Sessions pushed to begin killing federal death row inmates again last year and famously suggested that capital punishment was applied too restrictively; that drug dealers, too, should be executed.
William Barr, the current attorney general, now simply is implementing what Sessions started. The feds say they will not fight in court, as so many capital states have, over the efficacy of a three-drug lethal injection cocktail or other deadly brew. Instead, following the lead of capital punishment states like Missouri, the Bureau of Prisons will try to kill condemned prisoners using a single drug: pentobarbital. And so the feds announced Thursday that five federal inmates at the death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, already have been issued their death warrants.
It doesn’t matter to Trump, or to Barr, that violent crime rates are down in America and at generational lows in many jurisdictions. It doesn’t matter that, as more states abolish the death penalty, executions are down across the country and that the imposition of death sentences in murder cases also is waning for good and practical reasons. It does not matter to this administration that conservative opposition to capital punishment has grown significantly over the past decade or so. Or that the American people, slowly but surely, are turning away from it as well, with less than half of Americans saying that the death penalty is applied fairly……
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