Eric Holder was conducting a review of the death penalty, but it wasn't completed
by the time he announced his resignation and now may never be.
Federal executions are rare. In nearly 90 years, there have been only
37 of them. The last—in 2003—was of Louis Jones, Jr., a 22-year Army veteran who had been convicted of kidnapping, rape and murder. There are 61 people on federal death row now, one of them having been there for 22 years. Since 2010 there has been an informal moratorium on federal executions until the matter of lethal injections is sorted out in court.
It was not the prospect of federal executions but rather a screwed-up state execution in Oklahoma a year ago that spurred President Obama to order a Department of Justice review of the death penalty nationwide. Although Obama had supported capital punishment, he said at the time:
“In the application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems—racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty, you know, situations in which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to have been innocent because of exculpatory evidence. And all these, I think, do raise significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied.”
But, while former Attorney General Eric Holder has long been personally opposed to the death penalty, and
called for a moratorium nationwide until the Supreme Court rules on lethal injection, the death penalty review he promised was not completed by the time he left the A.G.'s post. Matt Apuzzo
reports:
As the Justice Department sought advice from experts on both sides of the issue, opposition to the idea came from unexpected corners. Some of the most outspoken voices against the death penalty also urged the most caution, fearful that a federal announcement would actually do more harm than good.
“From my view, we’re better off with things bubbling up in the states,” said Henderson Hill, the executive director of the Eighth Amendment Project and one of several people consulted by the administration last year. “I’ve never been all that enthusiastic about the executive branch’s role.” While 32 states allow the death penalty, many have their own moratoriums on executions and the number of people put to death is declining.
There was the fear of some death penalty foes that having Obama and Holder as the faces of opposition to capital punishment could make ending it harder by chasing away libertarians and some evangelical Christians who have joined liberals in challenging the continuation of this barbaric practice. In a word, racism could undermine the efforts to challenge the death penalty. Within the administration, there was fear about optics. What would be the political impact if Obama chose to commute the sentences of all or some of those 61 death-row inmates, many of them convicted of heinous crimes?
Whatever the Supreme Court rules in the matter of lethal injections, it seems apparent that we'll see no progress on eliminating the barbaric practice of capital punishment during the current administration.