A version of this essay appeared on Religion News Service on August 27, 2024.
PHOTO: Abraham Bonowitz of Death Penalty Action and Esther Brown of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty in Alabama stand with other death penalty opponents at a Tuesday, July 16, 2024, rally in front of the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery, Ala. (AP Photo/Kim Chandler)
In a surprise move, the Democrats quietly removed abolishing the death penalty from the party platform.
“We are not going back.” That has been the passionate rebuttal of Democrats to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign, which is unashamedly about making America White again, going back to the golden days of America… when white guys held all the power and Black folks had “black jobs.”
Unfortunately, the DNC has gone backward rather than forward, in a move that caught many of us by surprise (thanks to Jessica Schulberg: https://www.huffpost.com/
As the festivities finished up in Chicago this week, the DNC quietly removed abolishing the death penalty from the party platform, a move that certainly will not help the Democrats distinguish themselves from Trump and win this election. A recent Gallup poll found 65% of Democrats oppose capital punishment.
Even beyond the Democratic Party, public support for the death penalty has been steadily declining with a majority of Americans now wanting alternatives to execution. Movements like Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty are now seeing a surge of conservative lawmakers who are done with death. The death penalty is on its way out, and Democrats are in danger of missing a chance to make history.
Even though most of the world has abolished the death penalty during my lifetime, the United States is one of the few countries that continues to execute. In fact, the US is usually in the top 5 countries with the most executions annually and is almost always in the top 10. The other countries with the most executions usually include China, Iran, Saudia Arabia… not the best company to keep when it comes to human rights.
Here in the US, there are promising signs that the death penalty is on its way out. Executions have been dropping nearly every year, and new death sentences are the lowest they’ve been in decades. There are only a handful of states that continue to carry out executions each year. One state alone, Texas, accounts for nearly half of our country’s executions. Nearly every year or two, a new state abolishes the death penalty. It is noteworthy that the states that execute are also former Confederate states, one more reminder that the death penalty is part of our shameful history of racial terror, lynching, and slavery… a reminder of the worst parts of our past. Where lynchings were happening 100 years ago is where executions happen today. The states that held onto slavery the longest are the same ones that continue to hold on to the death penalty.
But even here, there is hope. In 2021, Virginia became the first formerly Confederate state to abolish the death penalty, the same year that Joe Biden became President. Interestingly enough, as Virginia was turning away from the death penalty, so was Joe Biden. He became the first US President to publicly oppose the death penalty, after changing his mind as a former death penalty supporter.
It is noteworthy that in the past Biden championed the 1994 Crime Bill which, among other terrible things, expanded the crimes that were punishable by death at the federal level, resulting in even more people on federal death row facing the possibility of execution. In one of his not-so-shining moments he even boasted the bill did “everything but hang people for jaywalking.” Biden has some work to do to repair that past.
When Donald Trump became President, he ended a 17 year pause in executions. Trump reignited the federal death house in Terre Haute, Indiana, and began killing people at a rate we have not seen in 100 years. It is the first time in modern history that federal executions outnumbered state executions. Trump continued killing people even after he had lost the election, and kept the executions rolling until four days before Biden was inaugurated (our last federal execution was January 16, 2021). There is no doubt that if Trump is re-elected he will continue to kill. We don’t even have to speculate on that. The Project 2025 plan leaves no room for doubt – Donald Trump will kill everyone on federal death row. On page 554 of the 887-page document there is an explicit plan to execute every remaining federal death row prisoner — and to challenge the Supreme Court to expand the types of crimes that can be punishable by death.
Many of us have fought hard for alternatives to the death penalty, and we were encouraged in 2016 when the Democratic Party formally made abolishing the death penalty a priority, adding to the official platform: “We will abolish the death penalty, which has proven to be a cruel and unusual form of punishment. It has no place in the United States of America.”
So yes, it is disappointing that this commitment has been removed from the DNC platform, a key priority that sets Democrat apart from pro-death-penalty Republicans like Trump. But to be honest, we don’t need words right now. We need action.
We need President Biden and VP Harris to not only pause executions during their administration. We need them to stop executions for good. We need them to “abolish and demolish.” We need them to abolish the existing federal death penalty cases by commuting all the sentences of those on federal death row to life. And we need them to demolish the federal execution chamber in Indiana. It is a building that is designed for only one purpose – to kill human beings. If they are serious about “not going back” – we need them to help lead us into a better future by making the death penalty history. Abolish the death sentences and demolish the execution chamber… and we need it done before January.
