12/12/2020
President Chump claims to have been the greatest President America has ever had. He is, obviously, his own biggest fan.
The orangutan president has ended a 17 year pause on federal executions and, as a long term 'fan' of capital punishment, he is aiming to sign off on more killings than any president in over 100 years.
There are a few key facts to be acknowledged in this regard:
It is usual for federal executions to be put on hold during a presidential transition period. There was in act a 130-year-old precedent for this.
Until the current POTUS resumed federal executions, there had been none since 2003 and there had only been three in the previous 15 years - since the federal death penalty was reinstated by the US Supreme Court in 1988.
Popular opinion for capital punishment has waned. A Gallup poll in November 2019 found that 60% of Americans supported life in prison over the death penalty. This was the least support for the death penalty since the survey began over 30 years ago.
All of the people that Trump is planning to have killed before he leaves the office of POTUS on 20th January 2021 would appear to have mental health issues and it would appear that this was a factor in the crimes they committed.
Trump has had 10 inmates executed in 2020; a single-year total (of federal executions) unmatched in modern history. The last time there were 10 or more federal executions in a single year was in 1896. These 10 killings have actually taken place in less than a year, n fact in less than six months, with them having commenced in July 2020.
If Trump does press ahead with the scheduled executions for January, the number he has sent to their deaths will equal the greatest number killed by federal execution in a decade; and he will have done this in just six months.
There is no doubt that the people Trump is having executed have committed some horrible crimes. However, his appetite for sending people to their deaths appears to have nothing to do with the severity of their crimes or the danger they pose if they remained alive.
One of the men killed this past week was involved in a burglary where a husband and wife were put in the boot of their car and then shot. The man who was executed on Thursday, Brandon Bernard (40), was 18 at the time of his crime in 1999. He wasn't the man who shot and killed the couple, but was sentenced to death for his involvement; he followed the instruction of the shooter and set fire to the vehicle in which the bodies lay. In the years since his conviction, he had been described as a model prisoner. He had demonstrated positive behaviour throughout his 20 years in prison and had even reached out to others, counselling them not to follow in his path.
Taking his life in this manner, over 20 years after his crime, made no sense.
Amongst the people that argued for clemency were the prosecutors in his case 20 years ago, the majority of the surviving jurors from the court case, two of the lawyers that helped defend Trump in his impeachment trial and famous people like Kim Kardashian.
Trump didn't listen though and Brandon Bernard was killed by lethal injection.
There are crimes for which I might be able to have some degree of agreement with a call for the death penalty. However, these government sanctioned killings do not appear to be ethical. American legislation is supposed to prevent the death penalty being applied for crimes committed by people who are intellectually disabled.
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