Trump’s death penalty pledge for Washington DC is ugly racial politics | Austin Sarat

The Columbia district carried out his last execution in 1957. In April, he put Robert Eugene Carter to death for killing a police officer while Carter was trying to flee a flight he had just committed.

At the time, the law of the national capital made the penalty of death compulsory for the first degree of the type of crankcase committed. He died on the electric chair.

If Donald Trump has his way, it will not take long before Washington DC sees a return of capital punishment. At a meeting of the cabinet on Tuesday, the president promised to bring him back.

He said, “If someone kills someone in the capital, Washington DC, we are going to ask for the death penalty.” This comment was almost apart from a conversation on the sale of government buildings to private real estate promoters who, he said, would become rich when he finished making Washington a “city without crime”.

“By the way, speaking of this,” continued the president as if his memory had been triggered by the conversation to rid of Washington of the crime. “Anyone who murdered something in the capital, capital punishment, capital, capital punishment,” he repeated as if he enjoyed the play of words without a serious mortal subject.

“It is a very strong preventive,” he said, ignoring the mountain of evidence stressing the fact that the death penalty is not an effective means of deterrence. He thought that the country may not be “ready for that”, but that said “we have no choice”.

And with Trump typical that flourishes, he insisted that “all those who heard it agree”, although it is not clear what it was reference, capital punishment or its supposed preventive power.

The president’s promise that all murderers would get the death penalty to DC falls under the previous long -standing court which says that death sentences can never be compulsory. In addition, he plays in the complex racial policy that always focuses on the use of capital punishment in the United States.

Before saying more about these two questions, let’s examine the story of the death penalty in the Columbia district. According to the Death Penalty Information Center: “The first execution recorded in Washington, DC was the hanging of James McGirk in 1802.”

McGirk killed his pregnant wife and the twins she wore. Her Irish heritage was at the forefront of the public discussion of her crime and the way she should be punished. A newspaper underlined the fact that McGirk “neither born nor educated in America”. He asked, “How long can we expect our young Aboriginal to remain unused”?

In 1865, Mary Surratt, who conspired to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln, was hanged in the district. And another presidential assassin, Charles GUEAU,, was put to death in 1882 for killing President James Garfield.

All in all, from McGirk to Carter, 118 people were executed in Washington by civil or military authorities. Unsurprisingly, Race played a key role in this story.

After 1962, the death penalty was no longer a compulsory punishment for murder in the city. And in 1981, the municipal council completely abolished the capital punishment, a decision ratified by the votes a decade later.

But the preference of voters does not seem to disturb the president. In this case, he does not need to worry about this due to the status of DC and the monitoring of the federal government.

This means that the office of the American lawyer, under the supervision of the Ministry of Justice, and not local officials, would be responsible for transforming the president’s plan. And no one should be surprised that the president wants the death penalty to be part of his plan to rid Washington DC of crime.

On the first day of his second term, he published an executive decree ordering the Attorney General to “continue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity requiring its use”.

Does this mean all murders and murderers?

In 1976, the Supreme Court clearly indicated that it did not think it. The court canceled a status of Northern Carolina which made the death penalty compulsory for first degree murder.

What Judge Potter Stewart said in this case is particularly instructive when we consider what Trump discussed on Tuesday.

“The history of compulsory laws on the death penalty in the United States”, wrote Stewart, “reveals that the practice of determining the death penalty all those condemned for a particular offense has been rejected as an unduly severe and lower decency. The two crucial indicators of the evolution of the standards of decency concerning the taxation of the sanction in our society – the determinations of the Jury and the legislative implementation.

Stewart explained: “At least since the Revolution, American jurors have, with a certain regularity, ignored their oaths and refused to condemn the accused where a death sentence was the automatic consequence of a guilt verdict … The 19th century, journalists, statesmen and manners were repeatedly observed that jurors were often interrupted.

And he underlined the rejection of the Columbia district in 1962 compulsory death sentences as an important indicator of “contemporary standards of decency”.

Due to its severity and its severity, the condemnation to death must, said Stewart: “Allow the particular consideration of the relevant aspects of the character and the record of each defendant condemned before the imposition of him of a death penalty”.

Respect for these constitutional subtleties has never been the continuation of the president, especially when she hinders a policy he wishes to pursue.

Beyond his unconstitutionality obviously, the restoration of capital punishment for all those who commit a murder to Washington DC would mean bringing back one of the most racist practices of this country in a place where more than 40% of residents are blacks.

We know that the race plays a role at each stage of the capital penalty process. Black defendants are more likely to be accused of capital offenses and to undergo death sentences than whites, especially when murdered people were white.

But the racial effects do not stop there. Blacks condemned to death are more likely to be chosen for execution and to build their executions.

Trump may not know these details, but he most likely knows how the death penalty is with many blacks. As the criminologist James Unnever and his colleagues note: “There is a clear racial fracture in favor of the death penalty, the whites promoting and the blacks opposing this sanction. This fracture has persisted for decades and remains statistically and considerably significant even when the controls are introduced for the known correlations of the attitudes of the death penalty.

“A significant part of this chasm is explained, however, by racism, with whites that demonstrate the anima in blacks being more likely to embrace the fatal punishment of delinquents.”

If the federalization of the police and the establishment of armed soldiers in the streets of Washington DC sent a powerful signal of white domination in a city with a substantial black population, Trump’s words on the death penalty have strengthened this message. When the time comes, it will be up to the courts to defend the precedent of the Supreme Court on the mandatory death sentences and to put an end to the racial policy that DC restoration would represent.

In the meantime, it should be remembered that the last person has executed that there was a 28 -year -old black man who killed a white policeman and was subject to a compulsory death penalty.

• Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of case law and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 pounds, including horrible shows: sloppy executions and the death penalty in America