A convict was executed Thursday in the United States, the Trump administration breaking with a tradition that outgoing presidents who are not reelected to stay executions. Orlando Hall was executed in an Indiana state prison by injection of pentobarbital, the justice department said.
“Today, Orlando Cordia Hall was executed in the US penitentiary in Terre Haute in accordance with the death penalty unanimously recommended by a federal jury”, the justice department said on its website.
The 49-year-old African-American was sentenced to death in 1995 for participating in the kidnapping, raping and murder of a 16-year-old girl, Lisa Rene, whom he beat and buried alive, with accomplices, as part of a settling of scores. He was executed after the rejection of a final appeal by the Supreme Court. It was the first decision of new Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barnett, who spoke like the other five Conservative justices in the nine-magistrate court.
Although their client did not deny the role he played in Lise Rene’s death, her lawyers, Marcia Widder and Robert Owen, have denounced “Racist prejudice” during his trial before an all-white jury. According to them, his file “Reflects disturbing racial disparities in capital punishment in the United States”, where 45% of those on death row are African-Americans, while they represent only 13% of the global population.
Eight executions since July
This is the eighth federal execution since the resumption this summer of a practice that had been put on hold for seventeen years and opposed by Democratic President-elect Joe Biden, who is to be sworn in on January 20.
While the American states have almost all given up applying the death penalty since the start of the pandemic, the government of Donald Trump has, on the contrary, carried out an unprecedented number of executions: eight since July, against three in the forty -the last five years.
Two more executions are planned for the coming weeks, despite a tradition observed for one hundred and thirty-one years, which is that the unreelected presidents postpone the executions while waiting for their successor to take the oath. Donald Trump still refuses to acknowledge his defeat to Joe Biden in the November 3 election.
The execution of Lisa Montgomery – who would be the first woman executed by the federal government in seventy years -, initially scheduled for December 8, has been postponed to December 31, her lawyers having contracted Covid-19. The United States also plans to execute Brandon Bernard on December 10.
