Trump expected to end the Biden-era death penalty pause and expand it to more prisoners

President-elect Donald Trump put federal death row inmates on notice this campaign season as he warned he would reverse a moratorium on executions put in place under the outgoing Biden-Harris administration.

“President-elect Trump has not shied away from the use of the death penalty,” said Matt Mangino, a former district attorney for Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, and an expert on the death penalty. “He presided over thirteen executions in the last year of his first term.”

However, the new president also says he wants to expand the death penalty for other crimes, putting executions on the table for child rapists, human traffickers and illegal immigrants kill Americans or police officers.

That requires support from Congress and the Supreme Court.

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Some of those ideas face obstacles. In 2008, the Supreme Court declared the death penalty for child molesters unconstitutional if the child survives. American counter top reported on Monday.

However, with Trump in the White House, a Republican majority in the Senate and conservatives holding a 6-3 advantage on the current Supreme Court, advocates are hopeful for a reversal.

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“The Supreme Court has said that the death penalty should only be used when it comes to the death of the victim, but that is subject to change with the makeup of the current Supreme Court,” Mangino told Fox News Digital.

Three of the four justices who dissented from the 2008 Kennedy v. Louisiana decision are still on the court: Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

It would also be a groundbreaking step to impose the death penalty on people convicted of drug or human trafficking, Mangino said.

“The death penalty for drug and human trafficking would be unprecedented in the Western world,” he said.

Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, sparked international outrage after a violent war on drugs in his Southeast Asian country, he noted.

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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has pledged to fight efforts to expand the death penalty.

In July, the organization noted that Trump paid for a full-page ad in the 1980s calling for the implementation of the “Central Park Five” – who were convicted of rape and sexual assault over an attack in the park. New York State had no law at the time allowing the death penalty for rape cases and banned the death penalty altogether in 2004.

More than a decade after their wrongful convictions, all five were exonerated based on DNA evidence. One of them, Yusef Salaamis currently a New York City Council member.

According to the American newspaper The Guardian, there are currently forty federal prisoners on death row Death Penalty Information Centerand the list includes surviving Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Dylann Roof, who massacred nine parishioners at a South Carolina church.

Justice Department data shows the federal government has executed 16 people since 2001, with the Oklahoma City bomber killed Timothy McVeigh and eight days later the American drug trafficker Juan Raul Garza, who had two men murdered and a third himself executed.

Thirteen of those executions took place during Trump’s first term.

According to federal data, individual states executed 1,542 convicted prisoners between 1977 and 2022. Texas led the way with 587 executions, more than the next two states combined – Oklahoma with 119 and Virginia with 113.

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According to the ACLU, during virtually the same period – between 1973 and 2023 – 192 death row inmates were exonerated and released.

Individual states have their own death penalty system – or lack thereof – and would not be as affected by the Trump administration’s policies.

“Trump will have a Republican Senate and most likely a Republican House,” Mangino said. “He can do a lot with the death penalty and only the Supreme Court can put the brakes on – and how likely is that?”