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      in Elections

      Death Row Inmate in Shaken Baby Case Set to Testify in Texas House

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      Robert Roberson, whose execution was postponed last week, has been subpoenaed to appear on Monday before a committee of the State House.Robert Roberson, the Texas death row inmate whose execution in a strongly disputed shaken baby murder case was postponed last week, is scheduled to testify on Monday before a committee of the State House.A subpoena for his testimony, issued in a novel last-minute legal maneuver, halted his execution just before it was set to be carried out on Thursday evening. The Texas Supreme Court ruled that by issuing the subpoena, a bipartisan group of Texas House members had raised legal questions about the separation of powers that needed to be resolved.The Texas House and Mr. Roberson’s lawyers had hoped he would appear in person before the Legislature’s committee on jurisprudence. But over the weekend, the office of the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, representing the Department of Criminal Justice, stepped in and said that, “in the interest of public safety,” Mr. Roberson would only be made available by video conference from prison.The Texas Supreme Court ruled on Sunday that as long as Mr. Roberson was able to give testimony in response to the subpoena, it would not involve itself in the dispute over how he would testify. So Mr. Roberson’s appearance seemed likely to take place by video conference, aides to the Texas House said, though negotiations over the matter were continuing.Mr. Roberson’s lawyers have argued that his autism, which was diagnosed after the murder conviction, would make any attempt to judge his credibility by video conference “profoundly limited.” And they said that having him appear remotely without his lawyers by his side would deprive Mr. Roberson of access to counsel during the questioning.Mr. Roberson’s case has drawn extensive national attention. A broad range of supporters — including a majority of the Republican-controlled Texas House, the novelist John Grisham and the detective who helped convict Mr. Roberson — have raised questions about the conviction, which relied in part on a finding of shaken baby syndrome.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘I’m terrified I’ll be executed’: Trump win could bring spree of death row killings

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      If Donald Trump wins the election, he is expected to pursue a spree of executions that could fast-track the cases of people on federal death row, and threaten the life of a man with a longstanding innocence claim.Advocates for people on death row fear a second Trump term could be worse than his first, which saw an unprecedented 13 federal executions. Under Trump, more people incarcerated in the federal system were put to death than under the previous 10 presidents combined, a staggering number that raised grave human rights concerns.Among those who were executed were people with intellectual disabilities. Defendants were deprived of opportunities to present new evidence. Some were killed after lawyers said the execution method was “tortuous”. In some cases, executions occurred over the objections of both victims and prosecutors.Since his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Trump’s pro-death penalty rhetoric, which dates back to his 1989 campaign against the Central Park Five, has only escalated. He’s recently called for executions of “everyone who gets caught selling drugs” and has reportedly suggested government leakers should be executed for treason. Last year, Rolling Stone reported, Trump allegedly floated bringing back firing squads and hangings and pursuing group executions and televised killings.Project 2025, the rightwing blueprint for a second Trump term that was written by Trump’s allies, although it has been disavowed by the former president, calls for the US government to do “everything possible to obtain finality” for the 40 people on federal death row. It also urges the president to expand capital punishment to non-homicide crimes and push the US supreme court to overrule precedent limiting death sentences to murders.“Trump has said he plans to finish what he started,” said Billie Allen, 47, in a recent call from federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana. Allen, convicted of a 1997 robbery and murder, has maintained his innocence, but he has exhausted his appeals. “I’m terrified that I will be executed – not just because I’m going to die, but because I’m going to die for something I didn’t do … I can only hope that as someone who is innocent he would do the right thing.”‘Lawless’ killing spreeThe federal killings under Trump all took place during his final months in office, and they raised significant concerns about the rights of US capital defendants.View image in fullscreenThe first execution, in July 2020, was of Daniel Lee, condemned to death for a 1995 killing of three family members; his co-defendant, considered the “ringleader”, got life in prison. The lead prosecutor, judge and victim’s family opposed execution. But the justice department pushed to proceed, even when there was a court injunction halting the execution. Lee was strapped to a gurney for four hours while the government fought to move forward, and the supreme court greenlit the proceeding at 2am. He was killed by lethal injection.Days later, the US executed a 68-year-old man whose lawyers had won a brief injunction after arguing he was unfit due to advanced Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and schizophrenia.Other cases included a man who was not the shooter and had asserted his innocence; a man who suffered a painful condition akin to drowning during his execution; and a case where five jurors and a prosecutor objected.“There was a big rush to kill with a lot of trampling on fairness, procedure and just basic decency,” said Ruth Friedman, director of the Federal Capital Habeas Project, which represents death row defendants and was Lee’s counsel. “It was a parade of horribles.”Across 13 executions, she said, courts issued more than 20 stay orders halting the killings. But the supreme court and appeals courts repeatedly rejected the rulings.“It was the lowest point in my 34 years of practicing law, not only because of the breathtaking speed of those 13 executions, but also the ways in which the court system utterly failed our clients,” said Kelley Henry, a federal public defender. “The brokenness of the death penalty system was on full display in a way that shook me to my core.”Henry represented Lisa Montgomery, who was executed in the final week of Trump’s presidency, the first woman put to death by the US government in nearly 70 years. Montgomery had been convicted of murdering a pregnant woman; her attorneys said she suffered profound mental illness stemming from horrific abuse and argued she should be barred from execution due to incompetency.In Montgomery’s final weeks, four courts sided with her lawyers and issued stays. But the US bureau of prisons plowed ahead, and the supreme court, at around midnight on the day of her scheduled lethal injection, tossed out the lower court rulings. Montgomery was pronounced dead at 1.31am on 13 January 2021 – before her competency claim had been resolved.View image in fullscreen“The 13 executions were lawless,” said Henry. “I never believed the legal system could be so politicized. It’s untenable to me that it could happen again.”View image in fullscreen40 men on death rowThe 40 men currently held on federal death row represent systemic problems with capital punishment, experts said. The majority are people of color, and 38% are Black (while Black people comprise 14% of the American population), said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. In 58% of cases, at least one victim was white. And nearly one in four men were 21 or younger during the crime.“By every objective measure, the federal death penalty is irretrievably broken,” said Maher, noting that some death sentences were secured during the racist crackdown on “superpredators” in the 1990s, and some relied on discredited “junk science” techniques.It’s unclear how many men could be immediately vulnerable under Trump, as their litigation is in varying stages, but advocates fear a chaotic rush led by his justice department. Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, spearheaded the last execution spree and approved the use of the drug pentobarbital. Advocates have little hope that he’d use his presidential authority to issue clemency grants or pause federal executions.“I feel fairly confident that [a second Trump] administration, if it comes to pass, could try to cut some corners,” said Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project.Kamala Harris has previously opposed the death penalty, but has been silent on it during her presidential campaign, and a call to abolish capital punishment was left out of the Democratic party’s platform this year for the first time in 12 years. The Harris campaign didn’t respond to inquiries. Joe Biden issued an executions moratorium in 2021.Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, didn’t respond to questions about Trump’s executions and his plans for federal death row, but said in an email: “President Trump has repeatedly stated he supports the death penalty for drug dealers. He will carry out that promise when elected.”‘I deserve to live’Billie Allen, the defendant at risk of execution, was convicted of a 1997 bank robbery in which two men killed a guard.One suspect was arrested on the scene; Allen was arrested hours later.Allen has said he was shopping at a mall during the robbery, and a mall guard told police that he saw Allen at that time, his lawyers told the federal pardon office earlier this year. Blood on the scene believed to belong to a robber did not match Allen’s, DNA tests showed. And while the getaway car exploded, Allen tested negative for traces of gasoline. His lawyers say his trial attorney was ineffective.In a statement, a US attorney’s office spokesperson defended Allen’s conviction, pointing to a 2001 appeals court ruling that said that Allen confessed after his arrest, that eyewitnesses identified him in a lineup and that he was “primarily responsible” for firing the fatal shots.Allen has said he didn’t confess, an officer testified he “threw away” notes from the confession, and other eyewitnesses described a suspect who didn’t match him.“I’m hopeful because I have evidence of my innocence,” Allen said. “I believe if someone in Biden’s administration examines this, I’ll be home after 26 years convicted for a crime I didn’t commit.”“But we’re dealing with a system that’s flawed,” he continued, pointing to the recent Missouri execution of a man prosecutors suggested was innocent. Allen has focused on writing and art while imprisoned: “If I’m executed, I want people to look back on my art and see this guy was documenting the trauma he went through on death row … he documented for us that he’s human, he deserves to live and is innocent.”Allen has remained scarred from Trump’s executions, recounting hearing guards walking by his cell, not knowing whether he’d be taken to be killed. And he lost close friends, one by one: “I came in at 19. These are people I grew up with. I’m seeing them be carried out, never to return again, never to see them smile or hear them laughing.”Allen said he wished people recognized death row defendants were capable of change: “The majority of people here become better men for themselves, their family and friends and supporters.”Yvette Allen, his sister who has been fighting for his release, said the stress of the high-stakes election has been overwhelming: “There is no time to breathe. Every day is a sense of urgency. We’re working every day making sure the world sees he’s innocent before it’s too late.” More

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      in US Politics

      How a Michael Portillo BBC film inspired a US push for nitrogen-gas executions

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      Shortly after Alabama last week carried out its second-ever execution using nitrogen gas, state officials took credit for pioneering what they see as a breakthrough approach to the death penalty – even though it has sparked outrage and revulsion among critics.But the idea to execute inmates in the US with nitrogen was actually set in motion by a rebellious and ultra-conservative lawmaker in Oklahoma, and surprisingly involves a former British Conservative MP turned television personality, Michael Portillo.Both promised such executions would be free of the complications that had plagued lethal injections and that sentenced prisoners would drift off painlessly to sleep – though witnesses to both executions have described a very different process.Nitrogen executions were first legislated in 2015 by Oklahoma, a US state boasts the highest execution rate per capita and a long history of death penalty innovation, having also been the first to introduce the lethal injection in 1977.The story of its most recent innovation in execution methods involves a documentary hosted by Portillo. After a career in British politics, where he was once seen as a darling of the Conservative right, Portillo reinvented himself as a television presenter. He later became famous for shows on the BBC such as Great British Railway Journeys.But in a bizarre collision of worlds, it was his film How to Kill a Human Being, broadcast by the BBC in 2008, that helped persuade the Republican representative Mike Christian and a high-school friend of his to pursue a bill writing nitrogen executions into law. So convinced were they by Portillo’s film and findings that they screened it at the Oklahoma capitol in September 2014.“I remember it being quite disturbing,” said Emily Virgin, a Democratic representative present at the time who voted against the nitrogen bill Christian later authored. In 2015, it passed 85 to 10 in the Oklahoma house and unanimously in the Senate.View image in fullscreenThe bill had been a while in the making. By 2014, states across the country were struggling to enforce capital punishment. Anti-death penalty advocates had successfully lobbied drug companies to stop supplying them with lethal injection drugs and many states were forced to improvise. Some attempted to get their drugs via illegal backchannels while others sought out substitute compounds, but both contributed to a string of botched and messy executions.In April 2014, things came to a head. Oklahoma’s supreme court issued a stay on the execution of death-row inmate Clayton Lockett over issues of secrecy around its lethal injection drugs. Incensed by the move, Christian, who was also a former state trooper, drafted a resolution to impeach the five justices who had supported the stay and was quoted in newspapers around the country for saying of Lockett’s execution: “I realize this may sound harsh but as a father and former lawman, I really don’t care if it’s by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, guillotine or being fed to the lions.”The stay was soon overturned by Oklahoma’s governor, and Lockett’s execution went ahead. The executioners tried for almost an hour to establish an intravenous line before inadvertently injecting the drugs into the tissue around his groin. Witnesses saw him writhing in a pool of blood and according to an inquiry by the Oklahoma department of public safety the execution took 41 minutes, during which his heart rate dropped to six beats per minute.Months later, Christian was back with another plan. He had gathered more than a dozen or so Oklahoma legislators and public officials for a judiciary committee meeting at the Oklahoma capitol to make the case for something new.“We knew there was a problem after the Lockett execution,” he said, according to a recording of the meeting. “In 1977 we became the first state to adopt lethal injection. My wishes are in 2015 we abolish, possibly, lethal injection and we go to this new innovative method, which is death by nitrogen hypoxia.” Then, on a television in the meeting room, he screened Portillo’s BBC documentary.At the start of the 50-minute film, Portillo sets out to discover the “perfect killing device” for carrying out humane executions. After touring labs and meeting with experts across the US and Europe, he finds that all the methods known to the west – including the firing squad, electric chair, cyanide chamber, and hanging – are flawed. But, he concludes: “I think hypoxia is the solution.”View image in fullscreenThe term hypoxia simply describes when the body’s cells receive insufficient oxygen to function and can be induced in many ways. In the film, Portillo attempts to experience hypoxia at a Dutch air force training facility, where he sits in an altitude chamber that simulates oxygen-thin air. Satisfied that the experience was painless, he seeks out a more practical way to starve somebody of oxygen and meets a veterinarian who tells him that if a human were forced to breathe just pure nitrogen they would lose consciousness “within 15 seconds” and die “within a minute”.“It turns out a canister of gas, a tube and a mask can be the perfect killing machine. It’s as simple as that,” says Portillo.On the day his film was screened for Oklahoma officials in 2014, some six years after it first aired in 2008, Christian brought along with him a part-time professor of political science at Oklahoma’s East Central University, Michael Copeland, who was also a high-school friend and had been involved in his election campaign.“People that aren’t familiar with the legislative process might think that state governments like Oklahoma have a bunch of experts on their payroll to advise them, but that’s not really what happens. Members can go out and they dispatch people that work at colleges,” said Copeland when asked about his involvement.He and some peers at the university produced a 14-page research paper which found that the use of nitrogen would not require the participation of a “licensed medical professional”, nor the “cooperation of the offender being executed”.“It’s such a simple procedure, it would be hard to do it wrong,” said Copeland when asked about the specifics of a nitrogen execution. “You won’t find one person who is for the death penalty in general but thinks that this method is somehow complicated, or you won’t be able to implement it correctly.”Another person present at the meeting was David Cincotta, legal counsel to the Oklahoma department of corrections at the time. “The details provided in the research that had been done were not close to what would be required to defend the method in court,” he said when asked about the material presented.Christian was part of a highly conservative rebel faction of Republicans in Oklahoma who were further to the right than the mainstream Republicans, according to Virgin. One of his friends in that group was Senator Randy Terrill, who in 2013 was sentenced to a year in prison for bribing a Democratic candidate to withdraw from a Senate election so that Christian could have her otherwise unwinnable seat. Their mutual friend Copeland testified in support of Terrill during his trial.Before that, the group pursued a controversial bill calling for the installation of a monument of the Ten Commandments outside the Oklahoma capitol. And when Christian ran in 2017 for the Oklahoma county sheriff’s office, documents emerged indicating that in 1999 he was reprimanded for toasting to the death of a judge who had ruled against a lawsuit seeking to have the Confederate flag returned to the state capitol. The group that brought the suit was an Oklahoma division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.View image in fullscreenWhen asked why Oklahoma passed its nitrogen bill in 2015 but never followed through on developing and finalizing a protocol, Copeland said: “Nobody wants to be the first. You don’t want to be the one who gets blamed if something goes wrong.”But just a few states over in Alabama, Republican senator Trip Pittman caught wind of the Oklahoma bill and figured nitrogen might cure the execution woes they were facing in his own state, so he authored his own. “Misery loves company,” he said. “Oklahoma had passed the bill and they had done the research.”Fortunately for Pittman, a dogged attorney in the Alabama attorney general’s office by the name of Lauren Simpson was ready to step up, and wasn’t scared to do the legal work necessary to get nitrogen executions over the line. But she didn’t come out unscathed. In a rare and humiliating move, in 2021 she was fined for misleading the courts over whether Alabama’s death row inmates were properly briefed on how and when they could choose between lethal injection and nitrogen. Simpson declined to comment on her involvement, citing a lack of permission from her office.The Alabama protocol she had a hand in developing sees a firefighter-style gas mask attached to the prisoner’s face, which is then filled with a stream of pure nitrogen, thus depriving them of oxygen and causing them to die.The smoothness of Alabama’s two nitrogen-gas executions has been widely disputed by their few witnesses. While the state has claimed they were “textbook,” others have described them as more violent than some botched lethal injections.“Despite misinformation campaigns by political activists, out-of-state lawyers, and biased media, the State proved once again that nitrogen hypoxia is both humane and effective,” said Alabama’s attorney general Steve Marshall, minutes after the second execution last week.Yet in both nitrogen executions almost all witnesses spoke of jerking against restraints and gasps for air over several minutes. A prison official involved in the first execution, carried out in January, later acknowledged in a sworn statement that it took “longer than I had expected.”In a statement to the Guardian, Copeland disputed that Alabama’s executions had gone wrong, saying: “There was some movement during the procedure, which could be interpreted as either conscious struggling or the involuntary movements typically exhibited by people who are dying.”“The death penalty is never going to be something pleasant,” he said. “Nobody wants to die.” More

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      in Elections

      America Does Not Need the Death Penalty

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      Capital punishment is not a front-burner political issue this year. In fact, the Democratic Party dropped the subject from its 2024 platform, eight years after becoming the first major party to formally call for abolishing the death penalty. But in 2020, President Biden’s campaign platform included a pledge to “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.” Once elected, he became the country’s first sitting president openly opposed to capital punishment.It would be an appropriate and humane finale to his presidency for Mr. Biden to fulfill that pledge and try to eliminate the death penalty for federal crimes. Such an effort would also remind the nation that this practice is immoral, unconstitutional and useless as a deterrent to crime.For more than two decades now, most barometers of how Americans view capital punishment — the number of new death sentences, the number of executions and the level of public support — have tracked a steady decline. There were 85 executions in 2000 but only 24 last year and 13 so far this year, all carried out in only seven states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah.While a majority of Americans, about 55 percent over the past several years, remain in favor of the death penalty for convicted murderers, half no longer believe it is used fairly. The Gallup Crime Survey, which has been testing opinions on this subject of fairness since 2000, found in last October’s sampling that for the first time, more Americans believed the death penalty was applied unfairly (50 percent) than fairly (47 percent).“I regret deeply that we followed the easiest path.”This editorial board has long argued that the death penalty should be outlawed, as it is in Western Europe and many other parts of the world. Studies have consistently shown, for decades, that the ultimate penalty is applied arbitrarily, and disproportionately to Black people and people with mental problems. A death sentence condemns prisoners to many years of waiting, often in solitary confinement, before they are killed, and executions have often gone awry, arguably violating the Eighth Amendment ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Lake Elsinore Serial Killer Confesses to 1986 Murder of 19-Year-Old Woman

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      William Lester Suff, 70, was already on death row for a dozen murders in Southern California. Now, he has confessed to killing a 19-year-old woman, shutting a 1986 cold case, officials said.A convicted serial killer on California death row for murdering a dozen people in the 1980s and ’90s confessed to the 1986 murder of a 19-year-old woman in Los Angeles County, the police announced on Tuesday.William Lester Suff, 70, confessed in May 2022 to stabbing Cathy Small to death and dumping her body on a South Pasadena, Calif., cul-de-sac, where her body was discovered by police on Feb. 22, 1986, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department announced at a news conference on Tuesday. Why the announcement came more than two years after the confession was not clear.Ms. Small’s body was found in the morning wearing a nightgown, and she died from multiple stab wounds and strangulation, Lt. Patricia Thomas said.Ms. Small’s body was identified three days later by a man who had read about the killing in the news and had called detectives to say he was concerned that the victim could be his roommate.He told detectives that she had worked as a prostitute in the Lake Elsinore area and had lived at his house for a few months, Lieutenant Thomas said.The man said that Ms. Small left their house on the night of Feb. 21, 1986 wearing a nightgown. Ms. Small, he added, told him that a man named Bill was paying her $50 to join him on a drive to Los Angeles.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Utah Officials Backtrack on Untested Execution Drug

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      An execution, scheduled for next month, would have used an experimental three-drug combination that critics said could inflict serious pain.Plans to use an experimental three-drug combination in an upcoming execution in Utah — a cocktail that critics said could inflict serious pain — have been scrapped after state officials said in court documents released Saturday that they would be able to seek an alternative.Taberon D. Honie, who was convicted of aggravated murder in 1999, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Aug. 8. It would be the first execution conducted by that method in the state in nearly 25 years. The Utah Department of Corrections recommended using an untested three-drug cocktail of ketamine, fentanyl and potassium chloride when it could not find sodium thiopental, the drug required by Utah law, or other alternatives.That drug has been challenging to obtain for more than a decade, after Hospira, the only American producer of sodium thiopental, announced it would stop selling it, citing concerns about producing the drug in Italy. But many states across the country where the death penalty is legal have struggled for years to obtain and properly use suitable drugs for lethal injections.A lawsuit filed last week by Mr. Honie’s lawyer against several Utah prison officials expressed many concerns about the proposed drug cocktail, including that it would not create the anesthesia Mr. Honie needed to be “unconscious, unaware and insensate to pain,” when the potassium chloride, which stops the heart, is administered. The drugs carried the risk “of serious pain and unnecessary suffering,” the lawyer, Eric Zuckerman, wrote in the complaint.On Friday, Brian Redd, the executive director of the Utah Department of Corrections, agreed instead to obtain the sedative pentobarbital for Mr. Honie’s execution, a drug that is now used by other death penalty states. Mr. Redd also vowed to abandon the idea of using the three-drug combination in any execution if pentobarbital could be supplied.“We still believe that the three-drug combination would have been effective, but we also recognize we could’ve been caught in a lengthy court battle,” said Glen Mills, a spokesman for the department.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Former White House staffer says Trump called for leaker to be executed

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      Former White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin has disclosed that Donald Trump repeatedly mused out loud about executing people at several meetings while she worked for him during his presidency.Griffin’s claim, which she made in a podcast recording with Mediaite released on Friday, is likely to add to concerns that a return for Trump to the Oval Office could be characterized primarily by political retribution.The former communications director for the Trump administration told the outlet she had been at a meeting at which he “straight up said a staffer who leaked … should be executed”, referring to an anonymously sourced report that the former president had gone into a secure bunker at the White House at the height of the racial justice protests prompted by a Minneapolis police officer’s murder of George Floyd.“There were others where we talked about executing people,” Griffin said.In response to Griffin’s comments, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told Newsweek: “As President Trump has said, the best revenge is the success and prosperity of all Americans.”Under the constitution, a president has no direct power to enforce capital punishment. But the president does have the power to appoint attorneys general who oversee key decisions concerning federal capital punishment.Rumors around Trump’s interest in summary executions have been making the rounds for years. As he geared up to run for a second presidency in November, Trump reportedly asked three people: “What do you think of firing squads?” And he has repeatedly backed expanding the use of the federal death penalty.According to Rolling Stone, Trump has also mused about bringing back hanging and the guillotine – all while televising their use – because it “would help put the fear of God into violent criminals”.A Trump spokesperson said at the time to Rolling Stone that “either these people are fabricating lies out of thin air” or the outlet is “allowing themselves to be duped by these morons”.But the Trump 2024 campaign has also said that if the former president returned to office, he was “going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs, to receive the death penalty for their pain”.During the final three months of Trump’s first term, the US executed 13 federal prisoners by lethal injection – a significant acceleration in the use of the death penalty by the federal government.Prior to that, only three people had been executed since 1963. But under the Trump administration, the federal government allowed any method of execution that was legal in the state where the death penalty was being carried out.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTerre Haute federal prison in Indiana, where Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed in 2001, has used hanging, electrocution and lethal injection.Trump attorney general Bill Barr has said that if Trump had won a second term in 2020, there had been an “expectation” that use of the federal death penalty would continue at an accelerated pace.Griffin’s claim that Trump called for the execution of a White House staffer is loosely corroborated by Barr during an interview he gave to CNN in April in which he recalled that Trump had been “very mad” about the White House bunker leaker.Barr said he couldn’t remember whether Trump specifically called for someone to be executed and doubted it would ever have actually been carried out. But he also said he “wouldn’t dispute” that Trump had called for someone to be executed over the bunker leak.Griffin left the White House in December 2020, weeks after Trump lost the election to Joe Biden but refused to accept the legitimacy of the result. She is now a commentator for CNN and co-host of the NBC talkshow The View. More

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      in US Politics

      Donald Trump had lots of negative opinions about felons. Now he is one.

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      Donald Trump has spent years complaining that American police and the criminal legal system should be “very much tougher”, arguing that some criminals should not be protected by civil liberties, police should rough up suspects and a much wider range of people should face the death penalty for breaking the law.Now that the former president has been convicted on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records, Trump is arguing that the US legal system is out of control. “If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” he said on Friday.Here’s a recap of some of Trump’s notable comments about “felons” and “criminals” – and a look at how the convict himself has actually been treated.Trump’s opinion: police officers should rough up suspects as they’re arresting themAddressing an audience of law enforcement officers on Long Island in July 2017, Trump told officers, “Please don’t be too nice”, and he mocked the idea of police making an effort to protect suspects’ heads as they’re put in the back of a police vehicle.“When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over [their head],” Trump said, pantomiming the gesture. “Like: ‘Don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody, don’t hit their head.’ I said: ‘You can take the hand away, OK?’”How Trump has been treated:On his way to his arraignment in the New York hush-money case last April, Trump was not getting roughed up by officers. He was instead posting angrily on his own social media platform about his feelings about his case. “Heading to Lower Manhattan, the Courthouse,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Seems so SURREAL – WOW, they are going to ARREST ME.” Trump arrived to be fingerprinted and processed via his own eight-car motorcade.Trump also did not get roughed up on his way to jail last August in Fulton county, Georgia, where he faces criminal charges in a separate case related to interference of the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden. Instead, his lawyers reportedly arranged for him to surrender at the Fulton county jail during prime-time cable television viewing hours.View image in fullscreenAfter flying to Atlanta on a private plane, and being processed in an unusually fast 20 minutes, Trump did have to take a mug shot at the jail, which he later said was “not a comfortable feeling – especially when you’ve done nothing wrong”.Trump’s opinion: allowing defendants to be released before their trials is dangerousIn 2010, 16-year-old Khalief Browder was arrested on suspicion of stealing a backpack. The New York teen maintained his innocence, but his family could not afford the $3,000 it cost to bail him out of jail while he awaited trial.Browder ultimately spent three years incarcerated on Rikers Island before facing trial. Suffering from delays, physical abuse and solitary confinement, Browder attempted suicide multiple times. His horrific story would galvanize calls to end cash bail in New York state and nationwide.But Trump has stridently opposed abolishing cash bail. And when New York state embraced cash bail reforms designed to keep more people out of jail while presumed innocent and awaiting trial, Trump criticised the move as dangerous.“So sad to see what is happening in New York where Governor Cuomo and Mayor DeBlasio are letting out 900 Criminals some hardened and bad onto the sidewalks of our rapidly declining because of them city,” Trump tweeted in 2019. “The Radical Left Dems are killing our cities.”How Trump has been treated:The former president had enough money to keep himself out of jail (and continue running for a second presidency) while awaiting his criminal trial in Georgia, though a judge there set his bail at $200,000. (Working through bail bond companies, as Trump did, defendants there typically pay about 10% of the total bail amount upfront.)Trump’s opinion: criminals should be denied civil liberty protectionsIn 1989, after a white woman was raped and bludgeoned while jogging in Central Park, five Black and Hispanic teenagers were falsely accused of the crime, and they said they were coerced into confessing their purported guilt during police interrogations. Trump took out full-page ads in multiple newspapers calling for the city to “unshackle” police from “the constant chants of police brutality” and suggesting the juveniles should be executed for the heinous crime.“BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY,” the advertisements read. “Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS.”Yusef Salaam, who was 15 years old at the time, later said that Trump’s advertisements had left the accused boys and their families frightened: “I knew that this famous person calling for us to die was very serious.”View image in fullscreen“I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” Trump had written in the ad. “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”Even after the Central Park Five were completely exonerated, and the city eventually paid them a multimillion-dollar settlement for taking years of their lives through imprisonment, Trump refused to apologize for his high-profile comments – or to consider the men as innocent.“Why did they all sign confessions and how many people did they mugg [sic] that night in the Park?” he tweeted in 2013. “What about their criminal records?”How Trump has been treated:When Trump was arraigned in New York in the hush-money case in April, Salaam – one of the Central Park Five defendants – published his own advertisement on social media.Salaam argued that Trump’s response to his multiple legal cases had been to warn of “potential death and destruction”, and to repeatedly threaten judges, prosecutors, court staff and others – actions that certainly represented, in Trump’s own words, “an attack on our safety”.Even so, Salaam said, he did not believe Trump’s civil liberties should be suspended.“I am putting my faith in the judicial system to seek out the truth,” the wrongly incarcerated man wrote. “I hope that you exercise your civil liberties to the fullest, and that you get what the Exonerated 5 did not get – a presumption of innocence, and a fair trial.”Salaam added that he hoped, if convicted, Trump would endure his punishment with “strength and dignity”, which his teenage cohort did while serving time for a crime the group did not commit.Other commenters have noted that Trump was in a relatively privileged position to even have his New York criminal case go to trial before a jury. More than 90% of felony convictions at both the state and federal levels are the result of plea bargains – not jury trials. Trials are expensive and time-consuming, and those who cannot afford to pay for a lawyer (which is most people) must rely on overburdened public defenders, who are typically struggling with unmanageably large caseloads.Trump’s team of private attorneys is already preparing to appeal his conviction.Trump’s opinion: criminal penalties should be harsher and more violentIn the decades since his newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, Trump has repeatedly endorsed harsher penalties for a wide range of crimes, including threatening 10-year prison terms for anyone vandalizing a statue or other federal monument, suggesting that people who sell illegal drugs should be executed, and praising the president of the Philippines for his approach to drugs, which included the extrajudicial killings of thousands of suspected drug dealers by both police and vigilantes.View image in fullscreenTrump publicly suggested that soldiers could shoot at people at US borders who throw rocks at them, reportedly suggested in private in 2019 that soldiers shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down, and reportedly made a similar comment about shooting protesters in the legs during the height of the social justice demonstrations prompted by a Minneapolis police officer’s murder of George Floyd in 2020.And it wasn’t just talk: the Trump administration ordered federal prosecutors to pursue the heaviest possible sentences, resumed executing prisoners after 17 years of an informal moratorium on the death penalty at the federal level, pulled the justice department back from investigating local police departments for civil rights violations, and blocked small-business owners with criminal records from receiving federal relief during the coronavirus pandemic.“Criminals only understand strength!” the president tweeted in 2020, criticising Portland’s mayor for his insufficiently tough treatment of local protesters demonstrating against police violence.How Trump will be treated:While Trump falsely claimed he is facing “187 years” in prison after his felony convictions this week, the maximum penalty in his case is actually four years. Legal experts say that, as a first-time offender convicted of a nonviolent crime, Trump is unlikely to face any prison time at all. Instead, his punishment is likely to be some combination of fines, probation and community service.Trump’s opinion: repeated critical statements about felons votingTrump made multiple false claims about thousands of felons illegally voting in Georgia and tipping the 2020 election results against him, according to the Washington Post’s database of 30,573 false or misleading claims that he made as president.When a news report revealed that billionaire Michael Bloomberg had raised $16m in 2020 to support a Florida non-profit’s efforts to restore the voting rights of people with felony convictions, Trump denounced the effort as a crime and accused Bloomberg of trying to buy votes for Biden by “bribing ex-prisoners to go out and vote”. Top Republican officials in Florida announced an investigation into whether Bloomberg had violated the law, and they eventually decided he had not.How Trump will be treated:Despite his felony conviction, Trump is likely to be able to vote in November’s presidential election due to voting rights restoration rules in Florida and New York. If difficulties emerge, he could ask Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who has endorsed him in the 2024 presidential race, for personal assistance restoring his voting rights. Regardless of whether he can legally cast a vote, his felony conviction does not stop him from running for president. More