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      Biden urged to commute sentences of all 49 federal death row prisoners

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      Led by two prominent African American congresswomen, 35 Democrats have urged Joe Biden to commute the sentences of all 49 federal prisoners left on death row – days after the Trump administration finished its rush to kill 13 such prisoners.Early last Saturday Dustin Higgs, 48, became the last of those prisoners to be killed, after Trump lifted a long-standing moratorium on federal executions. Biden entered the White House on Wednesday.According to the Death Penalty Information Center, of the 49 people still on federal death row, 21 are white, 20 are black, seven are Latino and one is Asian.Among those prisoners is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted of planting pressure-cooker bombs on the route of the Boston Marathon in April 2013, killing three and injuring 264. His death sentence was overturned last year, a decision that is now before the supreme court.In a letter sent to Biden on Friday, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Cori Bush of Missouri led lawmakers in calling on Biden “to take swift, decisive action”.“Commuting the death sentences of those on death row and ensuring that each person is provided with an adequate and unique re-sentencing process is a crucial first step in remedying this grave injustice,” they said.The representatives said they looked forward to the new administration enacting “just and restorative policies that will meaningfully transform our criminal legal system for the better”.Addressing Biden, they wrote: “By exercising your clemency power, you can ensure that there would be no one left on death row to kill.”Such a gesture, they said, would be “an unprecedented – but necessary – action to reverse systemic injustices and restore America’s moral standing.”Pressley has been consistently outspoken in her opposition to capital punishment. In July 2019, soon after Trump attorney general Bill Barr announced the lifting of a 16-year moratorium on federal executions, the Massachusetts Democrat proposed legislation to “prohibit the imposition of the death penalty for any violation of federal law, and for other purposes”.“The death penalty has no place in a just society,” Pressley said then.But by the time Trump left office, he had overseen the most executions by a US president in more than a century.Among those supporting the new appeal is Kelley Henry, a supervising assistant federal public defender based in Nashville and an attorney for Lisa Montgomery, who on 12 January became the first woman killed by the US government in nearly 70 years.“Congress is right,” Kelley told CNN on Friday. “President Biden must go further than just not carrying out executions and should immediately commute all federal death sentences.“When the supreme court, without any explanation, vacates lower court stays to allow the execution of a woman whose mental illness leaves her with no understanding of why she is being executed, we know the federal death penalty system is broken beyond repair.”New White House press secretary Jen Psaki would not be drawn on specific plans to address the federal death penalty.“The president, as you know, has stated his opposition to the death penalty in the past,” Psaki said. “That remains his view. I don’t have anything more for you in terms of future actions or mechanisms, though.”Karen Bass of California, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York were among other well-known names to sign the letter to the new president.Appealing to Biden in December, Pressley said: “With a stroke of a pen, you can stop all federal executions.” More

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      'This is not justice': supreme court liberals slam Trump's federal executions

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      The supreme court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer have excoriated the Trump administration for carrying out its 13th and final federal execution days before the president leaves office.Dustin John Higgs died by lethal injection at the federal correctional institute in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Friday night, after his 11th-hour clemency appeal was rejected.Higgs, 48, was convicted of murdering three women at a Maryland wildlife refuge in 1996, even though it was an accomplice who fired the fatal shots. Willis Haynes was convicted of the same crime but sentenced to life.“This was not justice,” Sotomayor, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote in an order issued late on Friday.Sotomayor, who was critical of the Trump administration’s July 2019 announcement that it would resume federal executions after a two-decade hiatus, condemned what she saw as “an unprecedented rush” to kill condemned inmates. All 13 executions have taken place since July 2020.The government executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than in the previous six decades“To put that in historical context, the federal government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than it had in the previous six decades,” she wrote.“There can be no ‘justice on the fly’ in matters of life and death,” Sotomayor added. “Yet the court has allowed the United States to execute 13 people in six months under a statutory scheme and regulatory protocol that have received inadequate scrutiny, without resolving the serious claims the condemned individuals raised.”Breyer, a fellow liberal on the nine-justice high court, was equally scathing, naming each of the 13 executed prisoners and noting a lower court’s observation that Higgs had significant lung damage. The lethal injection of pentobarbital, Breyer said, would “subject him to a sensation of drowning akin to waterboarding”.He said the court needed to address whether execution protocols risked extreme pain and needless suffering and pressured the courts into last-minute decisions on life or death.“What are courts to do when faced with legal questions of this kind?” he wrote. “Are they supposed to ‘hurry up, hurry up?’”Breyer went further than Sotomayor by questioning the constitutionality of the death penalty, the first member of the current panel to do so. The third liberal justice, Elena Kagan, also dissented in the Higgs case but did not give an explanation.Higgs’s petition for clemency said he had been a model prisoner and dedicated father to a son born after his arrest. He had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer when he was 10, it said.He was convicted in October 2000 by a federal jury in Maryland for the first-degree murder and kidnapping in the killings of Tamika Black, 19; Mishann Chinn, 23; and Tanji Jackson, 21. Although Haynes shot the women, Higgs handed him his gun.“He received a fair trial and was convicted and sentenced to death by a unanimous jury for a despicable crime,” the US district judge Peter Messitte wrote in December.Arguably the most high-profile execution of the Trump administration came just days ago when Lisa Montgomery received a lethal injection at Terre Haute and became the first woman put to death by the federal government almost seven decades.Her lawyer accused the Trump administration of “unnecessary and vicious use of authoritarian power”.Many believe officials rushed to complete a series of executions before Joe Biden is inaugurated on 20 January. Biden has stated his desire to have the death penalty abolished at federal and state level. More

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      Trump, the death penalty and its links with America’s racist history

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      This week, Donald Trump sanctioned the execution of the only woman on federal death row: Lisa Montgomery. She was the 11th prisoner to be killed since the president restarted federal executions in July last year. The Guardian US’s Ed Pilkington looks at why Trump has carried out more federal executions than any other president in almost 200 years

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      The chief reporter for Guardian US, Ed Pilkington, talks to Anushka Asthana about the history of the federal death penalty, which Donald Trump revived last July. Trump has so far sanctioned the executions of 11 prisoners, with a further two expected to take place by the end of this week. Lisa Montgomery, who was killed by lethal injection this week, was a particularly high-profile case. Subjected to torture and sexual violence as a child, she was suffering from extreme mental illness when she committed a horrific crime. The state of her mental health was not taken into account at her original trial. So why is Trump carrying out so many executions? Ed tells Anushka that although use of the death penalty is shrinking in the US, it is still employed in many of the former confederate states. You cannot talk about the use of the death penalty, says Ed, without looking at America’s relationship with its racist history and the impact it still has today. Archive: Newsy, Today, BBC News, CBS This Morning, AP, MSNBC; YouTube (Daily Kos), TED More

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      Last two federal executions under Trump can proceed, court rules

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      A US appeals court ordered that the last two scheduled federal executions under Donald Trump’s outgoing administration could proceed on Thursday and Friday, overturning a stay from a lower court delaying them until March to allow the two condemned men to recover from Covid-19.The US Department of Justice announced last month that Corey Johnson, 52, and Dustin Higgs, 48, had been diagnosed with Covid-19 but that it would proceed with their executions this month.Both men, convicted in separate murders, are being held on death row at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.On Tuesday, Judge Tanya Chutkan of the US district court ordered the executions be delayed until at least 16 March to allow the condemned men to heal, siding with medical experts who said their coronavirus-damaged lungs would result in inordinate suffering if they were to receive lethal injections.A split panel of judges at US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit overturned Chutkan’s stay by a 2-1 vote overnight on Wednesday.Lawyers for the two men asked the appeals court to reconsider the ruling by filing a petition on Thursday morning seeking a so-called rehearing en banc.“We will ask the full court to step in to reinstate the stay, but it is time for the government to stop carrying out super-spreader executions,” Shawn Nolan, a federal defender representing Higgs, said in a statement.Trump, a longstanding advocate of capital punishment, oversaw the resumption of federal executions last summer after a 17-year hiatus as the novel coronavirus continued to spread.Death row inmates, at least two of their lawyers and multiple prison and execution staff have since become ill with Covid-19.The president-elect, Joe Biden, will be inaugurated next Wednesday, and says he will seek to abolish the death penalty.Higgs was convicted of overseeing the kidnapping and murder of three women on the Patuxent Research Refuge in Maryland in 1996. He did not kill anyone himself, which his lawyers have argued is grounds for clemency.Johnson was convicted of murdering seven people in Virginia in 1992 as part of a drug-trafficking ring. His lawyers say he has an intellectual disability that means it would be unconstitutional to execute him.Their lawyers, citing medical experts who testified in court, say that their damaged lung tissue would rupture more quickly than usual after lethal doses of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate, had been administered.There could be a period of several minutes in which the men experience drowning as their lungs filled with bloody fluids – a pulmonary edema – before the drug rendered them insensate or killed them, the lawyers argued, calling it a form of torture.Earlier this week, Lisa Montgomery became the first woman executed in the US by the federal government in almost seven decades, after an appeal to the US supreme court failed. More

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      Death penalty kills belief that people can change | Letters

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      Austin Sarat writes powerfully about the Trump administration’s rush to execute federal prisoners (Trump is spending the last days of his presidency on a literal killing spree, 15 December). In the past weeks, it was Brandon Bernard and Alfred Bourgeois. Next in line are Lisa Montgomery, Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs.
      Joe Biden proposes to introduce legislation to abolish the federal death penalty. This will take time and its success is not guaranteed. But there is something he could do as soon as he takes office. This is to use his clemency power to spare the lives of the 50 or so individuals who will remain on federal death row. I estimate that it would take him four minutes to sign the required notices of commutation. This would ensure that the trail of bodies Sarat describes could not grow any longer.
      Is it too much to hope that Biden will set aside the time to do this during his first 100 days? It would be a magnificent gesture. Prof Ian O’Donnell School of Law, University College Dublin
      • When my friend, Brandon Bernard, was executed this month, he was a different man from the 18-year-old accessory to a double-murder (Trump administration puts Brandon Bernard to death amid rushed series of executions, 11 December). Spending two decades in solitary confinement changed him. Brandon never had a single infraction on death row. He did church youth outreach to help teens make better choices in life.
      He taught me many life lessons. To be open-hearted yet level-headed. To remain calm and patient. To be respectful and thoughtful and an attentive listener. To be kind. To live with a sense of optimism like one I’ve never witnessed. I want to hate the sin, but forgive the sinner after a horrible mistake and two decades of regret and reform. Martin Luther King Jr said “violence begets violence” and that holds true when the violence is committed by the government. Brandon became a beautiful person. When we killed Brandon, we killed the belief that one can change. Jen Wasserstein Washington DC, US
      • It has long been my view that any country that condones judicial murder in the name of justice cannot be deemed civilised. Suellen Pedley Stanford in the Vale, Oxfordshire More

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      Second federal prisoner scheduled to die in weeks has Covid, lawyers say

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      A second federal prisoner scheduled to be put to death next month, as the Trump administration rushes to execute more people before Joe Biden takes power, has tested positive for Covid-19, his lawyers said on Friday.Cory Johnson’s diagnosis came a day after attorneys for Dustin John Higgs confirmed he had tested positive at a US prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where both men are on death row.Johnson, Higgs and a third inmate, Lisa Montgomery, are scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection at the federal complex just days before Biden takes office.The Trump administration resumed federal executions after a 17-year pause in July and has carried out 10 death sentences since then, including two last week. It has executed more people in a single year than any other administration in more than 130 years and this year has killed more inmates than all the states put together.Johnson’s lawyers, Donald Salzman and Ronald Tabak, called on federal authorities to strike their client’s current execution date of 14 January – six days before inauguration day. Higgs is scheduled to die a day later.Montgomery’s execution date is 12 January, but because she is the only woman on federal death row she is held at a separate prison in Texas and would need to be brought to Indiana to be executed. She would be the first woman killed by the US government in 67 years.Johnson’s attorneys said his infection would make it difficult to interact with him in the critical days leading up to his scheduled execution, adding: “The widespread outbreak on the federal death row only confirms the reckless disregard for the lives and safety of staff, prisoners, and attorneys alike.”“If the government will not withdraw the execution date, we will ask the courts to intervene,” they said.The US Department of Justice and Bureau of Prisons did not respond to requests for comment.Prosecutors alleged Johnson was a crack cocaine dealer who killed seven people in 1992 in an attempt to expand the territory of a Richmond, Virginia, gang and silence informants. His legal team has argued that he is intellectually disabled, with a far below average IQ, and therefore ineligible for the death penalty.Higgs was convicted of ordering the 1996 murders of three women in Maryland. Montgomery was convicted of using a rope to strangle a pregnant woman in 2004 and then using a kitchen knife to cut the baby girl from the womb, authorities said.The Bureau of Prisons confirmed in a statement on Thursday that inmates on federal death row have tested positive for Covid-19. As of Thursday, there were more than 300 inmates with confirmed cases at FCC Terre Haute. The Bureau of Prisons said “many of these inmates are asymptomatic or exhibiting mild symptoms”.Nationwide, one in every five state and federal prisoners has tested positive for the coronavirus, a rate more than four times as high as the general population, according to data collected by the Associated Press and the Marshall Project. More

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      Trump is spending the last days of his presidency on a literal killing spree | Austin Sarat

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      In disregard for political precedent or basic humanity, Trump has fast-tracked federal executions before Biden takes officeDonald Trump is on a killing spree. He is turning the anger and resentment which burnishes his brand into a virtually unprecedented string of federal executions. From 14 July 2020, when the attorney general, William Barr, restarted the federal death penalty by executing Daniel Lewis Lee, through last week, the administration has put ten people to death. Three more executions are on the docket in the days leading up to the inauguration of Joe Biden.Last week, Trump and Barr executed Brandon Bernard even though his crime was committed when he was just 18 years old, and they killed Alfred Bourgeois even though his IQ put him in the intellectually disabled category. Continue reading… More

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      in US Politics

      'Abolish the death penalty': Brandon Bernard execution prompts wave of anger

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      A wave of outrage from human rights group, activists, elected officials, and others over the execution Thursday night of federal prisoner Brandon Bernard continued to grow on Friday behind a coordinated call for the abolition of the death penalty.Bernard, 40, was executed by lethal injection at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, after the US supreme court rejected a last-minute appeal to stay the execution and Donald Trump did not publicly respond to calls for him to intervene.After 17 years without a federal execution, the Trump administration has executed nine inmates since July, and plans five more executions before Joe Biden takes office on 20 January. Biden has pledged to eliminate the death penalty.Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley, the sponsor of legislation in the House to end the federal death penalty, tweeted footage on Thursday night of Bernard speaking from prison. “Abolish the death penalty,” she wrote.That call was taken up by activists from Pressley’s progressive allies in Congress to Vanita Gupta, president of the leadership conference on civil and human rights.In a world of incredible violence, the state should not be involved in premeditated murder“Brandon Bernard should be alive today,” Vermont senator Bernie Sanders tweeted on Friday morning. “We must end all federal executions and abolish the death penalty. In a world of incredible violence, the state should not be involved in premeditated murder.”Sister Helen Prejean, an anti-death penalty advocate, said she had spoken with Bernard the day before he died. He “told us about everything he was grateful for in his life,” she said. “He died with dignity and love, in spite of the cruel, unjust system that condemned him to die as a result of egregious prosecutorial misconduct.”Prejean called the killing a “a stain on us all”.Bernard was sentenced for a role in the 1999 killings in Texas of an Iowa couple whose bodies he burned in the trunk of their car after they were shot by an accomplice, Christopher Vialva.He directed his last words to the family of Todd and Stacie Bagley, the couple he and Vialva were convicted of killing: “I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s the only words that I can say that completely capture how I feel now and how I felt that day.”He was pronounced dead at 9.27pm eastern time.“Brandon Bernard was 19 when he committed murder,” tweeted Julián Castro, the former housing secretary from Texas. “Since then, five jurors and a former prosecutor have said they don’t support the death penalty in his case. Brandon will be the ninth person executed by the federal government this year. We must end this horrible practice.”Advocates for Bernard included the reality show star Kim Kardashian West and others thought to have Trump’s ear, including two lawyers who defended Trump at his impeachment trial this year in the US Senate and who filed briefs in the supreme court appeal, Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr.Todd Bagley’s mother, Georgia, spoke to reporters within 30 minutes of the execution, saying she wanted to thank Trump, the attorney general, William Barr and others at the justice department for bringing the family some closure. She became emotional when she spoke about the apologies from Bernard before he died and from Vialva, who was executed in September.“The apology and remorse … helped very much heal my heart,” she said, beginning to cry and then recomposing herself. “I can very much say: I forgive them.”In a statement when executions were resumed in July, Barr said the government “owed” it to victims to kill the convicts.“The justice department upholds the rule of law – and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” Barr said.Alfred Bourgeois, a 56-year-old Louisiana truck driver, is set to die Friday for killing his two-year-old daughter. Bourgeois’ lawyers alleged he was intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty. Several courts said evidence did not support that claim.The first series of federal executions over the summer were of white men, which critics said seemed calculated to make them less controversial amid summer protests over racial discrimination.Four of the five inmates set to die before Biden’s inauguration are Black men. The fifth is a white woman who would be the first female inmate executed by the federal government in nearly six decades. More