Just a few months after he took office, US Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a moratorium to halt federal executions — a stark contrast after his predecessor carried out 13 in six months. Under Garland’s watch and a president who vowed to abolish the death penalty, the US Department of Justice took on no new death penalty cases.
That changed on Friday as federal prosecutors said they would seek capital punishment for a white supremacist who killed 10 black people at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket. The decision does not change the halt on federal executions, but Garland’s first approval of a new capital prosecution opens a new chapter in the long and complicated history of the death penalty in the US.
Those complexities have been on full display in the past few years. US President Joe Biden campaigned in part on a promise to abolish it, but has taken few concrete steps to do so.
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The justice department has pulled back significantly on the use of capital punishment under Garland’s leadership, but also has shown a continued willingness to use it in certain cases.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said the president has discussed his views on the issue and would leave individual cases to the appropriate authorities.
The justice department, in keeping with its practice on ongoing cases, did not explain its decision.
“It’s a little hard to identify a consistent approach,” said Eric Berger, a law professor at the University of Nebraska. “This justice department is far more reluctant to use the death penalty, certainly than the [former US president Donald] Trump administration was, and far more cognizant of the problems, but it’s not willing to throw away the death penalty altogether.”
In Buffalo, 20-year-old Payton Gendron pleaded guilty to driving across the state to target a largely black neighborhood and carrying out the attack with a semi-automatic weapon marked with racial slurs and phrases including “The Great Replacement,” a reference to a conspiracy theory that there is a plot to diminish the influence of white people.
“It’s a mass shooting, and mass shootings have only increased over the years and gotten worse. It was also racially motivated, and that seems to be a huge factor here,” said Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor who studies the death penalty. “Garland is sort of indicating what he thinks is important, what would drive him to ask for the death penalty.”
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