The government of Donald Trump was betting on the US Supreme Court to lift vetoes issued by several courts and resume Monday the federal executions, interrupted for sixteen years.
But the highest US court decided otherwise by blocking Friday, December 6, these executions. However, it is a temporary suspension, pending a substantive review that the Supreme Court wishes to conduct in the next two months.
Justice Minister Bill Barr announced in July, surprisingly, the resumption of federal executions and scheduled five lethal injections in the Terre Haute, Indiana penitentiary between December 9, 2019 and January 15, 2020. Four of The convicted persons had taken the case to court in an emergency, challenging the protocol adopted to kill them. Courts have since agreed to suspend their executions, while they have the time to examine the merits of the case.
The Republican government, showing its willingness to punish perpetrators "Unnamed brutality", asked the Supreme Court to invalidate these decisions. The latter, "Given the stakes", refused Friday to decide, leaving for the moment the ball in the camp of the local jurisdictions.
"The courts have made it clear that the government can not rush executions to avoid judicial review of the legality and constitutionality of its new enforcement protocol"reacted Shawn Nolan, a lawyer for one of those sentenced to death.
"To sully his name"
saying "Act on behalf of the public and families", the Trump administration wants to be able to apply "Within a reasonable time" the sentences handed down more than fifteen years ago. The defenders of the convicts retorted that the federal government had taken years to define its new protocol and could wait a little longer to be sure of its legality.
Before the Supreme Court, which has undergone a major overhaul since the election of Donald Trump, does not push the date, Daniel Lee's execution was scheduled Monday at 8 am local time by injection of pentobarbital. This supporter of white supremacy was sentenced in 1999 to death for the murder of an eight-year-old couple and a girl.
Mother of one of the victims, Earlene Peterson implored President Trump to grant his "Clemency" sentenced in a video posted on the internet. "I do not see how Daniel Lee will honor my daughter, on the contrary it will dirty her name because she would not want that"explains the woman opposed to the death penalty by religious conviction.
In his video, Mme Peterson recalls that Daniel Lee was tried with another man who was sentenced to life imprisonment despite his leadership role in the triple murder. Donald Trump did not respond to this call.
The tenant of the White House, which seeks his reelection in 2020, regularly calls for increased use of the death penalty, especially for police killers. He also suggested it to fight drug trafficking.
Erosion of support for the death penalty
According to polls, support for the death penalty has eroded among Americans who are now only 54% to be favorable for murderers, against about 80% in the early 1990s. Only a handful of states, especially in the conservative south, still use it. Of the twenty-five executions in 2018, thirteen took place in Texas.
Most crimes are tried at the state level, but the federal courts can be seized of the most serious acts (attacks, racist crimes …) or committed on military bases or in Amerindian reserves.
In the last 45 years, only three people have been executed at the federal level, including Timothy McVeigh, who was responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing (168 deaths in 1995) in 2001. The last federal execution was in 2003.
Of the five executions announced by Bill Barr, the government appears to have given up on Lezmond Mitchell's sentence on Wednesday. The author of two murders on a Navajo reserve, he claims to have been the victim of racist prejudices and made a separate appeal against the four others on this ground. In October, an Arizona court suspended his execution to give him time to defend his arguments in court.