Trump expects to end the Biden-era pause on the death penalty and expand it to more inmates

President-elect Donald Trump drew attention to federal death row inmates this campaign when he warned he would lift a moratorium on executions imposed under the outgoing Biden-Harris administration.

“President-elect Trump has not shied away from using the death penalty,” said Matt Mangino, former district attorney for Lawrence County, Pennsylvania and death penalty expert. “In the final year of his first term, he presided over 13 executions.”

But the new president also says he wants to expand the death penalty to other crimes and put on the table the execution of child rapists, human traffickers and illegal immigrants who kill Americans or police officers.

This would require support from Congress and the Supreme Court.

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Some of these ideas face hurdles. In 2008, the Supreme Court declared the death penalty for child rapists unconstitutional if the child survives, the American Bar Journal reported Monday.

But 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 hoping for a turnaround.

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“The Supreme Court has said that the death penalty should only apply when the death of the victim is involved, but that may change with the makeup of the current Supreme Court,” Mangino told Fox News Digital.

Three of the four justices who dissented in Kennedy v. Louisiana in 2008 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 an international outcry after a violent war on drugs in his Southeast Asian country, he noted.

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A view of the U.S. Supreme Court on July 1, 2024 in Washington, DC (DREW ANGERER/AFP via Getty Images)

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

In July, the organization found that Trump had funded a full-page ad in the 1980s calling for the execution of the “Central Park Five” – ​​who were convicted of rape and assault for an attack in the park. New York State did not have a law allowing the death penalty for rape cases at the time and banned the death penalty entirely in 2004.

More than a decade after their wrongful convictions, all five were exonerated by DNA evidence. One of them, Yusef Salaam, is currently a New York City Councilman.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, there are currently 40 federal inmates on death row, and the list also includes surviving Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Dylann Roof, who massacred nine parishioners at a church in South Carolina.

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

A police mugshot of Timothy McVeigh is displayed at the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum in Oklahoma City on June 12, 2001, a day after his execution. (Getty Images)

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

According to federal data, individual states executed 1,542 condemned inmates 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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During almost the same period — between 1973 and 2023 — 192 death row inmates were exonerated and released, according to the ACLU.

Individual states have their own death penalty systems – or lack thereof – and would not be as impacted 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 it – and how likely is that?”