Trump promises death penalty for ‘rapists, murderers’ after Biden pardons

During his first term in office, Trump oversaw a series of federal executions unparalleled in modern history.

United States President-elect Donald Trump has promised to step up the use of the death penalty during his second term in office, saying he will go after “rapists, murderers, and monsters”.

Trump’s announcement on Tuesday came after outgoing President Joe Biden used his presidential pardon powers to reduce the sentences of nearly all federal prisoners on death row to life imprisonment without parole.

“As soon as I am inaugurated, I will direct the Justice Department to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters,” Trump said in a social media post. “We will be a Nation of Law and Order again!”

During his first term in office, Trump resumed federal executions after a nearly 20-year pause, overseeing the executions of 13 people. That figure was higher than any president in modern history.

A guard stands behind bars during a media tour of California’s death row at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, California [File: Stephen Lam/Reuters]

While people in the US continue to support the death penalty for crimes such as murder, that support is at its lowest point in decades, dropping from 80 percent in favour in 1994 to 53 percent in 2024, according to Gallup polling. In the same period, opposition has risen from 16 percent to 43 percent.

Supporters of the death penalty say capital punishment can give family members of victims of violent crimes a sense of closure and acts as a deterrent against crime although studies have found little evidence for the latter.

“The pain and trauma we have endured over the last 7 years has been indescribable,” Heather Turner, whose mother was killed during a 2017 bank robbery in Conway, South Carolina, said in a social media post blasting Biden’s decision.

Opponents say innocent people have been wrongly executed before they were exonerated, that the process for executing someone is long and costly and the death penalty has been wielded disproportionately against people of colour.

During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump leaned heavily into nativist attacks on immigrants that portrayed them as dangerous criminals and said he would seek the death penalty for undocumented immigrants who commit crimes such as murder and rape against US citizens.

Immigrants commit violent crimes at a lower rate than people born in the US, and immigrant rights groups see dark undertones in Trump’s fixation on violent acts committed by immigrants.

Opponents of the death penalty protest in Montgomery, Alabama, on November 18, 2024, against an execution in Alabama using nitrogen gas [Kim Chandler/Associated Press]

The three federal prisoners on death row whose sentences Biden chose not to commute were all found guilty of hate-motivated crimes.

They are Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black congregants of the Mother Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina in 2015; 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Robert Bowers, who carried out the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in US history when he gunned down 17 congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, killing 11.

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Al Jazeera and news agencies