Donald Trump is planning to execute more people in his remaining days as president than in the last seventeen years. In the last 50 years, only three people have been executed by the federal government. The last was seventeen years ago in 2003.
Trump started signing off on the executions, which an editorial board at the Washington Post called a “sickening spree of executions” back in July.
Eight people have already been executed in the five months since Trump reinstated the death penalty at the federal level.
The ninth execution is scheduled for December 10 and will be of 40-year-old Brandon Bernard who was sentenced to death at age 18.
Bernard is joined by three other Black men and a woman who are scheduled to be executed before Trump’s departure in January. They are: Alfred Bourgeois, Cory Johnson, Dustin Higgs, and Lisa Montgomery.
Montgomery would be the first woman executed at the federal level in 70 years.
Many highlighted Trump’s history with the death penalty after he purchased a full page ad in 1989 demanding New York state to “bring back the death penalty” following the wrongful conviction of the Exonerated Five.
Advocates for incarcerated people and prison abolitionists are raising awareness on social media of the executions, highlighting the death penalty is disproportionately handed to Black people. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, of the 54 remaining people on federal death row, 44 of them are Black.
The urgency of the executions is drawing harsh backlash, accusing Trump of wielding power in a “historically abhorrent” way.
As Trump signs off on the executions, federal investigations are underway in a potential bribery scheme involving those most loyal to him allegedly paying for presidential pardons.
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