What a spectacular and uncanny coincidence.
It has been 16 years since the federal government last executed an inmate. Opposition to capital punishment, coupled with press coverage of the execution of likely innocent Americans, the worldwide opposition of drug companies to the use of their products in execution procedures, and new skepticism over existing "humane" execution protocols had put a de facto moratorium on the process, while America struggled with whether to abandon it entirely. It is, of course, a highly polarizing debate.
But the Trump administration needs public distractions and needs them damn quick, so Trump Attorney General William Barr has announced, less than 24 hours after the testimony of special counsel Robert Mueller to two House committees, that we will be resuming capital punishment posthaste with an order to the Bureau of Prisons to schedule executions for five named federal death row inmates.
The identities of the five prisoners do not appear to be accidental. All five of Barr's choices are convicted of horrific acts against young girls; his team clearly intended the first five chosen to be criminals whose acts were so monstrous that America would rally, unified, to execute them. But that is not how opposition to capital punishment works. Opponents object to the amorality of killing as retribution; to the unnecessary, cumbersome, and extraordinary expense of the process compared to life imprisonment; to the notion that, for some classes of human beings, reformation is impossible—and that such judgments are ours to make.
So in both timing and choice of prisoners, there seems nothing casual about Barr's new announcement. Barr has been held in criminal contempt of Congress, and his Justice Department announced just yesterday it would be ignoring the charges against him, regardless of Congress' acts. More critical still, the special counsel responsible for the investigation of a wide-ranging and successful attack on the United States by a foreign government testified that the sitting president led an extended effort to obstruct and tamper with his investigation. That happened yesterday. Barr's announcement happened the next morning.
If we were to be extraordinarily cynical about it, we would note that regimes around the world have long staged new rounds of prisoner executions to distract the public during times of rising opposition to government leaders. Sometimes the prisoners are indeed very bad people. It makes for good press, something new to discuss and have emotions over in the cafes while the government brags about the obvious good it is doing. If we were to be extraordinarily cynical about it.
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