After 17 years of interruption, 13 people were sentenced to death between July 14, 2020 and January 16, 2021
The President-elect of the USA, Donald Trump, assured that he will order his Government to intensify the application of the death penalty, one day after Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 death row inmates.
“As soon as I take office, I will order the Department of Justice to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from rapists, murderers and violent monsters,” the future President wrote on the social network Truth Social.
Previously, Trump had criticized the decision of the incumbent President, who on Monday commuted the sentences of 37 people sentenced to death by the US federal justice system, just weeks before the transfer of power.
“Joe Biden just commuted the death sentences of 37 of our country’s worst killers. When you hear each man’s actions, you won’t believe he did this,” the Republican wrote in Truth Social.
Several human rights organizations recalled this week that Biden’s decision constituted the “largest number of death sentence commutations by an American President in modern times”.
These same organizations feared a wave of executions when Donald Trump returned to the White House on January 20th.
During his election campaign, Donald Trump had already called for expanding the scope of the death penalty, in particular for immigrants convicted of murdering US citizens or drug and human traffickers.
The last federal executions took place at the end of Trump’s presidency.
After 17 years of interruption, 13 people were sentenced to death between July 14, 2020 and January 16, 2021.
Of the approximately 2,300 inmates on death row in the United States, only 40 were convicted by federal justice, until the clemency measure taken by Joe Biden.
The Democratic President excluded three perpetrators of attacks from his measure, including Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the suicide bombers in the attack during the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013.
