On Donald Trump’s first day in office, he signed an order to reinstate the death penalty for federal death-row inmates, lifting the moratorium that had been in place since 2021. Only three individuals remain on federal death row after his predecessor, Joe Biden, commuted the death sentences of 37 people in December. In his Jan. 20 executive order, Trump tasked the attorney general to decide whether those pardoned by Biden could be charged in state courts – and to “take all lawful and appropriate action to ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose,” the Miami Herald/McClatchy News reports. But is that possible? The inmates whose sentences were commuted by Biden were sentenced to serve life in prison without the possibility of parole. Sheri Lynn Johnson, the assistant director of the Cornell Death Penalty Project, cited two barriers to those state prosecutions. First, Article II of the Constitution gives the president the unlimited power to pardon people in federal cases. Also, to prosecute the 37 federal inmates for the same offenses would likely violate double-jeopardy clauses, Johnson said.
But Hofstra law professor Eric Freedman told McClatchy News that “Biden’s order does not of its own force bar a state capital prosecution.” And John Blume, an attorney who has argued eight cases in front of the Supreme Court and is director of the Cornell Death Penalty Project, said it is possible for some of the inmates to be sentenced to death for a state crime, but it is highly unlikely. “In theory if they committed the crimes in a state that has the death penalty as a matter of state law, those states could seek the death penalty,” Blume told McClatchy News. “But, even in those jurisdictions many of the cases are old, the original state prosecutors are gone and I think it unlikely it will happen in any significant number of cases.”
Komentar