Trump’s death penalty push faces setbacks as judges block attempts to reverse prior decisions

Concord, NH – The administration of President Donald Trump vacillates in his aggressive prosecution of the death penalty when she revisits cases in which the predecessors explicitly decided not to ask for the sentence.

Since his entry into office in February, the American prosecutor General Pam Bondi authorized prosecutors to ask for the death penalty against 19 people, including nine accused in cases where the administration of President Joe Biden had asked for less sentences. But the judges blocked these attempts at reversal for all the accused except two, more recently on Monday in a pair of cases in the American virgin islands, showing the limits of the power of the Trump administration to cancel the decisions in the already well under way.

Continuing the capital penalty, the Ministry of Justice seeks to continue a promise as a Trump campaign to take over the federal executions after being interrupted by the prosecutor general of Biden, Merrick Garland. The Ministry of Justice of the Republican President accused the previous democratic administration of supplanting “the will of people with their own personal convictions” of them not having a death sentence in many cases involving horrible crimes.

Detailed opinions have not been issued in the last two cases, which involved a man accused of having killed a police officer in 2022 and two men accused of armed robbery and murder in 2018. But other judges who rejected attempts at reversal for constitutional and procedural reasons were frank in their assessment of the approach of the Trump administration.

“The government has been in a hurry in this case and, in doing so, exceeded major constitutional and statutory rights,” Trump’s US judge wrote in June in June, against three alleged members MS-13, accused of killing two adolescent girls in 2020.

The authorization of capital prosecutions generally occurs for years before the trial, but in the Maryland case, the prosecutors filed the opinion of death penalty less than four months before the start of the trial. None of the accused was represented by lawyers specializing in litigation on the death penalty, to which they were entitled under federal law due to the complexity of capital affairs and potential consequences.

“The government does not hide the ball here – the only reason for its rocking on the death penalty was the change of administration,” wrote Gallagher, who called the government’s “voluntary blindness” to the differences between the “surprising” capital and non -capital trials.

“This court will not put aside decades of law, professional standards and standards to adapt to the government’s pursuit of its program,” she wrote. “Of course, the elections have consequences, and this administration has the right to continue the death penalty in cases where it can do so in accordance with constitutional and statutory requirements. But it is not one of them. “

Maryland prosecutors and in a Nevada case refused to comment, but in court documents, they argued that the Ministry of Justice had an “inherent power” to reconsider the previous decisions and that the time of the death notice was “objectively reasonable” since the defendants had years to prepare for the trial.

“The Attorney General simply has reconsidered a previous decision, which is his prerogative to do so, and to exercise that inherent authority is not a fault but the management and basic governance,” wrote the American prosecutor of Maryland, Kelly Hayes. “At no time did the government made an enforceable promise. Deciding not to ask for certain accusations is not a promise not to do it. ”

Trump, the first administration of which made a record of 13 federal executions, signed an order on his first day of return to the White House, forcing the Ministry of Justice to request the death penalty in appropriate federal affairs and to support the capital punishment in the States. Bondi, who said she would ask for the death penalty “as far as possible”, quickly raised a moratorium at the time of Biden on federal executions and ordered an examination of the decisions taken by the previous administration.

The deadline for 120 days for this examination has passed without any official word on the results, but an official of the Ministry of Justice told the Associated Press that all cases except about 30 had been examined. The manager, who spoke under the cover of anonymity under the terms of the department, said that around 1,400 decisions not to ask for the death penalty had been issued by Garland, all except 459 having already been fully judged when Trump took office.

Bondi is not the first Attorney General to examine the previous cases: not only did Garland authorized only one case of death during his mandate, but he also withdrew 35 opinions of intent to request the death penalty issued by his predecessors. The Ministry of Justice says that the Bondi’s ordered examination was essentially “the setback” of Garland’s action and was the right thing to do to ensure coherence and do justice to the victims and their families.

But Robin Maher, executive of the death penalty information center, said that if the Biden administration’s actions reflected the drop in public support for the death penalty, Trump dismissed this.

“So, her enthusiasm for the use of the death penalty is different not only from the more cautious approach of President Biden, but she is different from the approach of all the other presidents of history,” said Maher, whose organization does not take a position on capital punishment but criticizes the way it is used.

The question of whether the inversions will be held is a question in two of the cases. In the others, the courts took the side of the accused who declared that they were reasonably based on the insurance made by the previous administration. In court documents, lawyers for some of the defendants said they would have exerted a plea negotiations or opposed the postponement of trial dates if they had known that the decision of the death penalty would be reversed.

“In some of these cases, very different paths have been taken when these insurances were given,” said Maher.

In Nevada, the prosecutors informed Cory Spurlock of their intention to ask for the death penalty only 12 days before they were tried in judgment for the death in 2021 of a Californian couple. This opinion are reduced in May, judge Miranda of the said that the government was far from justifying its “wholesale reversal at the eleventh hour”. The trial began this week after the prosecutors withdrew their appeal from its decision.

“The government has decided – certainly not inadvertently or accident – to reverse the course on a question of critical importance, involving Spurlock’s life, less than two weeks before the trial, fully knowing that the overthrow would have a chaotic impact on the progression of this case and would make the trial on the scheduled date impossible,” wrote, who was appointed by President Barack, a Democrat. “In these circumstances, this is certainly equivalent to playing” fast and loose ” with the orders of the court in particular and the judicial process in general. “

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The writer Associated Press, Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington, contributed to this report.