SOL 101.1 | To U.S. Federal Death Row Inmates, Today's Election is a Matter of Life or Death

USP Terre Haute, Indiana, where federal executions are carried out

In The Shadow Of The Federal Death Chamber, Executions Are On Hold — For Now

You don't have to tell Daniel Troya and the 40 other denizens of federal death row locked in shed-sized solitary cells for 23 hours a day, every day, that elections have consequences.

To them, from inside the U.S. government's only death row located in Terre Haute, Indiana, Tuesday's election is quite literally a matter of life and death: If Kamala Harris wins, they live; if Donald Trump wins, they die.

"He's gonna kill everyone here that he can," Troya, 41, said in an email from behind bars. "That's as easy to predict as the sun rising."

That's no hot take.

Trump is, after all, the most prolific execution president in modern American history. The Republican earned that title by reviving the long dormant U.S. death penalty program in 2020 and then presiding over 13 executions in the waning months of his presidency; the last took place on Jan. 16, 2021, four days before Democrat Joe Biden's inauguration. 

If Trump wins the election [Donald Trump was re-elected to be president and JD Vance was elected to be vice president on Nov. 5, 2024. - MNC], few doubt his plan would be to begin executing federal inmates again, ASAP, at Terre Haute's windowless death chamber on high ground over the Wabash River. 

There will still be one person who could single handedly save each and every remaining federal death row inmate, even if Trump wins. 

That would be President Biden.

With a mere stroke of his pen, the outgoing Biden could easily deprive an incoming Trump of anyone to execute by invoking his presidential powers to reduce all federal death sentences to life in prison. Once done, no future president could restore the death sentences. 

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." — Oscar Wilde

If Trump does win and Biden doesn't follow with across-the-board commutations, "Biden will be instrumental in permitting another death row bloodbath by Trump," said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project at Temple University's law school in Philadelphia. 

As a journalist, this author witnessed 10 of the 13 Trump executions at the Terre Haute death chamber and, since then, he has regularly interviewed prisoners on U.S. death row, most recently for this story.

In interviews over recent months, the inmates said it's not just the prospect of a Trump electoral victory that keeps them up at night. They are also obsessing over the question: will or won't Biden issue commutations to spare their lives?  

For now, the answer's not clear to them or anyone else. 

And what about Harris? Will she urge Biden to grant the clemencies in his two-month lame duck period after the election? Or, if she succeeds her boss as president, might she do it herself?

That's not at all clear, either. The former California prosecutor spoke against capital punishment years ago, but she has said little to nothing about the death penalty as vice president or as a presidential candidate.

In the 54 years before Trump became president, the U.S. government had executed just three federal inmates, all between 2001 and 2003, including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh's in 2001 during George W. Bush's presidency.

By the time he left office, no U.S. president had overseen more executions than Trump since Grover Cleveland presided over 16 nearly 130 years ago. Trump tallied more in six months than the 12 all presidents recorded in the previous 70 years, combined.

If anything, Trump's own enthusiasm for capital punishment has only grown over the last four years. Certainly, nothing suggests he has ever been burdened by second thoughts or haunted by the execution of prisoners he had executive powers to spare.

Death House, USP Terre Haute, where executions are carried out

On the campaign trail, he has spoken effusively about China's aggressive use of the death penalty, suggesting the U.S. should follow the Asian nation's example of executing drug dealers. China puts thousands of prisoners to death each year, making it the world's leading executioner, according to Amnesty International.

“President Xi in China controls 1.4 billion people, with an iron hand, no drug problems. You know why?” Trump asked his audience at a November 2023 campaign rally in New Hampshire. Trump provided his own answer: “Death penalty for the drug dealers.”

 

As recently as last Sunday, he told a Madison Square Garden rally he wanted death sentences for migrants who kill police. His New York City audience cheered, chanting “USA! USA!" in response.

Troya said that, if and when the executions do restart during a second Trump presidency, it would only be a matter of time before executioners came for him, too.

"Everyone understands it's a conveyor belt," he said. "Every execution is one closer to you."

That conveyor belt under Trump reduced the population on federal death row from 50-plus to around 40. 

Those still on it today include Robert Bowers, who killed 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, and white supremacist Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black South Carolina church-goers in 2015.

Also facing a federal death sentence is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev who, with his brother, killed three and injured hundreds in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. For security reasons, he's held at a U.S. supermax prison in Colorado.

Roof and Tsarnaev's crimes are better known. But all the men on federal death row were convicted of killings, many of them shocking in their brutality. Some killed one or more children, police officers or bank employees during robberies. 

To date, Biden hasn't said anything about or even hinted at the possibility of invoking his almost limitless commutation powers. U.S. presidents can only commute death sentences handed down by federal courts; they can’t commute sentences imposed by state courts.

Even among those in Washington, D.C., actively looking for clues out of the White House or anywhere else about what Biden might do have found none.

"Truth is, I've heard nothing and nothing from the Biden administration," said Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, executive director of the Washington-based Catholic Mobilizing Network, which advocates for the abolition of the death penalty. 

For now, federal defenders are tight-lipped, too.

They are understandably nervous about saying anything critical of Biden lest it jeopardize chances of clemency for their clients, explained Dunham.

Inmates fear that Biden, despite being the first U.S. president to have openly opposed the death penalty prior to taking office, won't summon the political courage to strike the death sentences.

Troya, convicted in drug-related killings in Florida, made a friendly bet with a fellow inmate that Biden will only commute a few of their death sentences. That could leave the door open for Trump to clear death row himself by putting everyone still on it to death.

Democrats as a whole have treated the issue like a political hot potato. In a nation split roughly 50-50 for and against the death penalty, they seem to have concluded there are few votes to gain and many to lose by sticking to the party's past anti-death penalty positions.

Proof Democratic Party powers-that-be want nothing to do with the issue, at least during the current campaign, came at its August convention. Democrats quietly deleted wording in its 2024 platform calling for the abolition of death penalty, wording that had been in its 2016 and 2020 platforms.

Trump has at least been consistent about his support for capital punishment. He's always supported it.

 

Biden's position on the death penalty through the years has more twists, turns and reversals.  

In 1984, the then-U.S. senator told a hearing that he feared too many innocent defendants ended up in death chambers.

"That is the reason I am against the death penalty," he said.

But after less than a decade, as both crime rates and support for the death penalty rose, Biden changed his tune. 

"I am a supporter of the death penalty," he said on the floor of the Senate during debate on a judicial appointment. He added: "I also think that when you apply the death penalty, you better darn certain be right." 

Not until 2019, though, in the early stages of his 2020 campaign, did Biden say publicly that he categorically opposed the death penalty. 

"Since 1973, over 160 individuals in this country have been sentenced to death and were later exonerated," Biden said in a 2019 tweet. "Because we can’t ensure that we get these cases right every time, we must eliminate the death penalty." 

Biden set his own standard for assessing his handling of death penalty issues when he promised on his 2020 campaign website to abolish the federal death penalty and lobby to end it in states.

He's done no such thing.

Yes, Biden's Department of Justice halted the Trump executions in 2021. But officially, the freeze was temporary. It wasn't meant as a first step toward abolition. It was designed merely to give the agency time to review and improve upon execution protocols.

      

In office, Biden himself has stayed mum on the topic. There appears to be no record of him mentioning the death penalty in public as president, not once.

Four years after his promise to end the death penalty, Biden likely now appreciates that opposing capital punishment in general is comparatively cost-free politically. Reducing a specific death sentence for a specific killer is another matter. 

Biden would likely dread the prospect, as any politician would, of having to defend commutations for Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev or any other convicted murderer to the communities where the killings occurred. 

To sidestep the backlash, past presidents have tended to issue controversial pardons and commutations days before they transition out of public office.

The Trump administration consistently portrayed the executions it carried out as glitch-free. 

They were not.

They were sometimes marred by procedural short cuts, hurried rulings and by a compliant U.S. Supreme Court that invariably sided with the government in denying stays.

Execution gurney, Death Chamber, USP Terre Haute

For their part, government attorneys accused inmates' lawyers of delay tactics, of desperately throwing legal issues at walls hoping they'd stick but knowing they were frivolous.

Some execution protocols seemed petty.

Surviving death row inmates were particularly incensed that, when fellow inmates were taken to the death chamber, staff forced them to wear adult diapers.

That Trump would even have anyone to execute by the time he became president in January 2017 wasn't inevitable.

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court in Furman v. Georgia declared all existing state and federal death penalty laws unconstitutional for violating prohibitions against "cruel and unusual" punishment.

The decision emptied death rows nationwide, automatically commuting the death sentences of 629 state and federal inmates to life in prison. It seemed to mark the end, or at least the beginning of the end of capital punishment in the United States. 

It was not.

Over following years, many states and U.S. lawmakers salvaged their death penalty laws by overhauling them to conform with guidelines laid out by the Supreme Court.

Politicians noticed capital punishment was back in vogue.

"The Democrats set you up to be killed and the Republicans kill you."

A one Sen. Biden played the pivotal role in revamping U.S. death penalty laws as support for capital punishment soared, peaking, according to the Gallup polling agency, at 80% in 1994. 

That very year Biden shepherded the now, much-derided Crime Bill through Congress that greatly expanded the number of federal crimes for which someone could be put to death.

“We do everything but hang people for jaywalking,” Biden boasted at the time.

Most of the prisoners executed under Trump were convicted under laws crafted by Biden. That fact led to one quip making the rounds on federal death row that the Democrats set you up to be killed and the Republicans kill you. 

There's a sense of déjà vu among the death row inmates and their lawyers. They've been on pins and needles before about whether an outgoing president would grant them all commutations. 

They also believed President Barack Obama might clear federal death row right before handing the keys of the White House to Trump in January 2017.   

He did not. 

On Jan. 17, three days before Trump's inauguration, Obama commuted just one federal death sentence, accepting that Abelardo Ortiz, a Colombian convicted in 2000 for a drug related killing, had a severe intellectual disability.

With a mere stroke of his pen, the outgoing Biden could easily deprive an incoming Trump of anyone to execute by invoking his presidential powers to reduce all federal death sentences to life in prison.

Obama could plausibly argue he just didn't know his successor would go on to execute as many prisoners as he did. Ignorance won't be an excuse available to Biden. 

     

"If Trump wins, Biden has to know what the consequences of leaving anyone on federal death row will be," Dunham, a leading expert on capital punishment. 

Whatever Biden decides to do or not do on the death penalty could become central to his legacy.

"It goes to Biden's decency as a human being," Dunham said. "Will he be remembered as someone who made a hollow campaign promise on the death penalty? Or will he be remembered for expressing honest views against the death penalty and then acting on them?" 

If Biden doesn't issue commutations, a victorious Harris could do it after her inauguration. Or, like so many presidents before her, she could kick the can down the road, leaving the freeze on federal executions in place and ignoring the issue entirely for four years.

  

The death row inmates aren't eligible to vote themselves, so they’ll have no say in who wins Tuesday. If they could, the vast majority would vote for Harris, said Troya.

Too many recall the anguish of seeing friends led away in 2020 to be put to death. 

There are some outliers. 

According to Troya, at least 10 of his 40 fellow inmates on federal death row would, if they could, cast votes for Trump, the candidate most likely to put them to death.

Trump's most vocal supporter on federal death row was Lezmond Mitchell, a Navajo Indian sentenced to death for the brutal 2001 slaying of a 9-year-old and her grandmother. 

From his death row cell, Mitchell would sometimes taunt Trump detractors around him, Troya recalled. 

When they ridiculed Mitchell as a Trump fanboy, he'd shout through a gap in his cell door, "Trump! Trump! Trump!" 

Federal staff, acting on President Trump's behalf, executed Mitchell in Terre Haute on Aug. 25, 2020.  

Source: X Account, Michael Tarm, November 5, 2024 (republished). Michael Tarm is a former legal affairs reporter for The Associated Press now writing a book about the Trump executions.

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