Experts welcome US federal moratorium on capital punishment

2024-04-24 11:54:54 News & Society

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Experts continue to discuss the moratorium on federal executions imposed by US Attorney General Merrick Garland who leads the United States Department of Justice.

It will remain in effect while a review of the Justice Department?s procedures and policies on capital punishment is pending.

?The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely,? Merrick Garland said.

According to the message published on the Ministry of Justice website, the previous administration made a series of changes to capital case policies and procedures. The current head of the department directed to lead a multi-pronged review of these recent policy changes, including a review of the Addendum to the Federal Execution Protocol, adopted in 2019, which will assess, among other things, ?the risk of pain and suffering associated with the use of pentobarbital.? In addition, they might consider changes to Justice Department regulations made in November 2020 that expanded the permissible methods of execution. How long the review will last is not specified.

The death penalty at the federal level was not carried out in the United States from 2003 to 2020. At the same time, the state authorities could independently appoint and conduct it. The death penalty is currently banned in 23 states.

In 2019, William Barr, then US Attorney General, resumed capital punishment for federal convicted offenders. As a result, last year, for the first time in American history, the number of federal executions in a year exceeded the total for all states. So, all in all, 17 people were executed in the country, of which 10 were executed at the federal level.

Analyzing the decision taken by the new administration, Carolyn Hoyle, Director of the Oxford University Death Penalty Research Unit, drew attention to the fact that Joe Biden became the first US president to make abolition of the federal death penalty part of his presidential campaign platform.

?Even with Trump?s [the 45th US President] increase of federal executions during the last six months of his presidency, the number of death sentences imposed in the US has fallen from over 300 in the mid-1990s to only seventeen in 2020,? the expert reminded.

She stressed that she fully supports the moratorium on the death federal penalty and hopes that it is a precursor to abolition de jure.

?The past decades have witnessed growing international consensus on the limits of state punishment, particularly for those deemed to be vulnerable. Though human rights, especially the right to life, drive an abolitionist agenda, particularly in Europe, they also frame progressive restriction in the use of the death penalty, fair trial procedures for states that retain the death penalty, and the right not to be subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments. Evidence from the US is clear that executions there are cruel, inhuman and degrading,? Carolyn Hoyle said.

?All the empirical evidence shows that the poor, Black people, and those who are vulnerable by way of poor mental health are more likely to be sentenced to death. Furthermore, innocent people have been sentenced to death and executed even though the US has a complex and reasonably thorough post-conviction review process,? she added.

According to her, the last three decades have witnessed an unprecedented global rate of abolition of the death penalty.

?Of the 193 member states of the United Nations, 107 countries have abolished the death penalty in law for all crimes, and a further eight countries have abolished the death penalty in law for ordinary crimes. Moreover, 72% of all countries in the world have abolished the death penalty in law or practice. Many retentionist states point to the United States in support of their own position and so it is vital that the US leads the way in abolition,? the expert said.

PenzaNews agency

Read the full article: https://penzanews.ru/en/analysis/67200-2021