(RNS) — “We are not going back,” goes the Democrats’ passionate rebuttal to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign — which is about going back to the “golden days” of America, when white men held all the power and Black folks had “Black jobs.” MAGA is in actuality MAWA: “Make America white again.”
Unfortunately, on at least one issue, the Democrats have gone backward rather than forward, in a move that caught many of us by surprise (thanks to Jessica Schulberg of Huffington Post for breaking this story). As the festivities finished up in Chicago last week, the Democrats quietly removed abolishing the death penalty from the party platform, a move that certainly will not help them distinguish themselves from Trump and win this election.
It’s surprising in part because a recent Gallup poll found 65% of Democrats oppose capital punishment. Even beyond the Democratic Party, public support for the death penalty has been steadily declining, with a majority of Americans now wanting alternatives to execution.
Even though most of the world has abolished the death penalty in my lifetime, the United States is one of the few countries that continues to execute. In fact, the U.S. is usually among the top five countries with the most executions annually and is almost always in the top 10. The other countries with the most executions usually include China, Iran, Saudi Arabia — not the best company when it comes to human rights.
There are promising signs that the death penalty is on its way out in the United States. Executions have been dropping nearly every year, and new death sentences are the lowest they’ve been in decades. There are only a handful of states that continue to carry out executions each year, and one state, Texas, accounts for nearly half of our country’s executions.
Nearly every year or two, a new state abolishes the death penalty, and movements like Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty are now seeing a surge of conservative lawmakers who are done with death.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, left, looks over the electric chair in the death chamber at Greensville Correctional Center with Operations Director George Hinkle, center, and Warden Larry Edmonds, right, prior to signing a bill on March 24, 2021, abolishing the death penalty in the state. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
It is noteworthy that the states that continue to execute are former Confederate states, a reminder that the death penalty is part of our shameful history of racial terror, lynching and slavery. The places lynchings were happening most frequently 100 years ago are those where executions happen the most frequently today. The states that held onto slavery the longest are the same ones that continue to hold onto the death penalty.
But even here, there is hope. In 2021, Virginia became the first formerly Confederate state to abolish the death penalty, the same year that Joe Biden became president. There is a connection here: As Virginia was turning away from the death penalty, so was Biden, who became the first U.S. president to publicly oppose the death penalty after once being a death penalty supporter.
Biden has some work to do to repair his past views. In 1994, Biden championed that year’s infamous crime bill, which, among other terrible things, expanded the crimes that were punishable by death at the federal level, resulting in more people on federal death row. In one of his not-so-shining moments, he boasted the bill did “everything but hang people for jaywalking.”
When Donald Trump became president, he ended a 17-year pause in federal executions, reignited the federal death house in Terre Haute, Indiana, and began killing people at a rate the federal government had not done in 100 years. For the first time in modern history, federal executions outnumbered state executions.
Trump continued killing people even after he had lost the 2020 election, keeping the executions rolling until January 16, 2021, four days before Biden was inaugurated. There is no doubt that if Trump is re-elected he will continue to kill. The Project 2025 plan leaves no room for doubt: On page 554 of the 887-page document is an explicit plan to execute every remaining federal death row prisoner and to challenge the U.S. Supreme Court to expand the types of crimes that can be punishable by death.
Many of us have fought hard for alternatives to the death penalty, and we were encouraged in 2016 when the Democratic Party formally made abolishing the death penalty a priority of the official platform, with a plank reading, “We will abolish the death penalty, which has proven to be a cruel and unusual form of punishment. It has no place in the United States of America.”
It is disappointing that this key commitment, and a signal difference with the Trump agenda, has been removed from the DNC platform. President Biden and Vice President Harris need to do more than pause executions for the remainder of their administration; we need them to stop executions for good. We need them to “abolish and demolish.” We need them to commute all the sentences of those on federal death row to life. And we need them to demolish the federal execution chamber in Indiana, a building designed for one purpose — to kill human beings.
If they are serious about “not going back,” we need them to help lead us into a better future by making the death penalty history.
(Shane Claiborne is an activist, author and co-director of Red Letter Christians. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily represent those of Religion News Service.)
