Biden’s empty promise on death penalty

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The U.S. Department of Justice’s decision this month to seek the death penalty against the Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket mass killer continues the federal government’s vacillation on capital punishment.

President Joe Biden purports to oppose the death penalty. He campaigned on a promise to stop federal executions and urged states to do the same. The Trump administration executed 13 people, after a half-century during which only three people in the federal system had been put to death. Five people were executed under Trump between his election defeat and Biden’s inauguration.

Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, temporarily suspended executions (as opposed to death sentences) pending “a series of reviews” and withdrew capital charges against more than two dozen defendants. Yet his department paradoxically asked the Supreme Court to reinstate a death sentence against Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and federal prosecutors sought death in cases that had begun before Biden became president.

Now, notwithstanding Biden’s declared rejection of capital punishment, the Justice Department is seeking a death sentence against Payton Gendron, who murdered 10 people in a racist, premeditated shooting spree at Top’s Friendly Market in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo on May 14, 2022. Gendron said he was motivated by the far-right “great replacement” conspiracy theory that white people are intended victims of a plan to supplant them with immigrants and others.

The same theory has motivated several other mass killings, including two in 2019 — an El Paso shooting targeting Latinos and resulting in 23 deaths, and an attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 51 Muslims.

The death penalty is wrong because killing as punishment is wrong, no matter how repugnant the crime. Some nations still impose particularly cruel sentences, like torture and dismemberment, that should have no place in any modern, civilized society. The U.S. correctly rejects those unacceptable punishments, yet it continues to put people to death.

By embracing capital punishment, the U.S. stands apart from every European country besides Belarus, which is hardly impressive company. Around the globe, only China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt put more people to death each year than the United States, when state as well as federal executions are tabulated (totals are unknown in North Korea, Vietnam, Syria and Afghanistan). These are not nations envied for the quality of their justice systems.

Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Thailand sentence more people to death, but carry out those sentences less often than the United States. Even Russia, which still has the death penalty on its books, has had a moratorium on executions since 1996.

In the U.S., nearly half the states have rejected the death penalty. California and eight other states still sentence people to death but don’t actually kill them. Executions occur only in eight former Confederate or slave-holding border states, plus South Dakota and Nebraska. And in Terre Haute, Ind., where the Trump administration reopened the federal death chambers. And where the Biden administration is asking to send Gendron.

Gendron has already been sentenced in New York state court to 11 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.