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Just under 20 years ago, in the inaugural issue of the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker authored this fascinating little article imagining the death pemalty circa 2022. The article’s title, “Abolition in Our Time,” reveals that the piece did not perfectly predict the future. But the piece did have this somewhat prescient take on how “the politics of the death penalty have shifted”:
Prominent politicians in both parties are willing to oppose the death penalty publicly, though very few make it a political priority. Many such leaders also distinguish between the importance of retaining the death penalty for cases in which “vital national interests” are at stake — the war on terrorism — and cases involving ordinary state law enforcement.
The Steikers’ article came to mind for me today as I read this new New York Times piece discussing the current state of the federal death penalty. The piece is headlined “Suspect in Bike Path Killing Faces First Death Penalty Trial Under Biden,” and here are excerpts:
On Halloween 2017, Sayfullo Saipov plowed a rented pickup truck down Manhattan’s crowded West Side bicycle path, smashing into pedestrians and cyclists, killing eight people and injuring more than a dozen, the authorities said.
Soon after Mr. Saipov was charged, President Donald J. Trump tweeted, “SHOULD GET DEATH PENALTY!” And his attorney general later directed prosecutors to seek execution if Mr. Saipov was convicted.
Last year, Mr. Saipov’s lawyers asked President Biden’s Justice Department to withdraw that order. Mr. Biden, after all, had campaigned against capital punishment. But his attorney general, Merrick B. Garland, denied the request, and on Monday, Mr. Saipov’s trial is scheduled to begin in Federal District Court in Manhattan — the first federal death penalty trial under the Biden administration.
Mr. Garland’s decision to continue pursuing the death penalty for Mr. Saipov, an Uzbek immigrant, suggests a nuanced approach, one in which he has been reluctant to withdraw the threat of capital punishment in one type of case in particular: terrorism-related offenses….
Since taking office nearly two years ago, Mr. Garland has not sought capital punishment in any new case and indeed has declared a nationwide moratorium on federal executions. The Justice Department has also withdrawn directives issued by previous administrations seeking the death penalty against 25 federal defendants, according to court records and the department’s data.
At the same time, the department has defended appeals of the death sentences imposed during President Barack Obama’s administration on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, and Dylann S. Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine members of a Black church in South Carolina….
A spokesman for the Justice Department said that as a matter of policy it does not offer public reasons for decisions to withdraw death penalty directives. Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, and David E. Patton, a lawyer for Mr. Saipov, declined to comment on the case.
But some lawyers said a pattern had emerged: None of the 25 defendants for whom the Justice Department has withdrawn death penalty requests were charged in a terrorism-related offense. “Early on, it became clear that notwithstanding the statements made by both the president and the attorney general, that there was going to be this sort of carve-out around terrorism,” said Anthony L. Ricco, a veteran death penalty defense lawyer in New York.
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