The Democratic Party has omitted the death penalty from its national platform for the first time in 20 years, following back-to-back cycles of opposing the practice outright.
The news came on Aug. 19, when the delegates to the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago voted to approve the new document, which is to guide the party’s electioneering for the next four years.
A former plank from the 2020 platform that stated, “Democrats continue to support abolishing the death penalty,” has been omitted, along with an entire paragraph related to sentencing minimums and retroactive sentence reductions.
The death penalty retreat from the Democrats is seen as part of a general shift on criminal justice reform, meant to attract voters ahead of a contentious 2024 general election that could see a major shakeup in Congress and state legislatures. Democrats are currently projected to be in close battles for control of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, respectively, which could explain their rightward shift with just over two months left until Election Day.
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who has opposed the death penalty in her past roles in California and in the Senate, did not mention capital punishment during her remarks at the Democratic National Convention—despite clarion calls from the camp of her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, to resume use of the federal death penalty.
President Joe Biden, who dropped his reelection campaign in July, has largely opposed the practice during his time in office. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a federal moratorium on use of the death penalty in 2021, pending a review of the Justice Department’s “policies and procedures.”
In the three years since, there has been no indication as to the status of that review, even as Garland has made moves to resume federal executions. These include his defense of the capital sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and a push this year for the death penalty in the federal case against Payton S. Gendron, who killed ten African Americans in a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, in 2022.
Biden's Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin III, also intervened this month to revoke the plea deals for three 9/11 co-conspirators, who could now face the death penalty more than two decades after the fact.
Earlier this year, Rep. Adriano Espaillat—one of two known Black Catholics in Congress—noted the Biden White House has not been a vocal supporter of his Federal Death Penalty Abolition Act of 2023, which currently sits idle in committee.
“I wouldn’t say that the White House has been actively engaging people to support the bill,” Espaillat told HuffPost in May.
Biden campaigned on working w/Congress to abolish the federal death penalty and incentivizing states to follow. Earlier this year, Rep. Espaillat, the sponsor of one of the bills told me, “I wouldn’t say that the White House has been actively engaging people to support the bill."
— Jessica Schulberg (@jessicaschulb) August 22, 2024
Even so, part of the 2024 platform shift on criminal justice is apparently due to promises kept. In 2022, the Biden administration eliminated crack-cocaine sentencing disparities dating back to the president’s own policy moves while serving in Congress. Last year, the U.S. Sentencing Commission recommended for the first time that federal sentence reductions be retroactive. (Both issues were in the 2020 Democratic platform plank that has been removed in the current cycle.)
However, insofar as the shift on the death penalty is a culmination of a general drift on criminal justice policy from the top down within the party, supporters of a “whole life,” womb-to-tomb ethic within its ranks say it’s time for a reality check.
“We progressed past the need for the death penalty in America long ago,” said Hayden Laye, development coordinator for Democrats for Life of America. “We continue to urge President Biden to commute the sentences of every single federal death row inmate to life in prison.”
Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, executive director of Catholic Mobilizing Network, spoke similarly, noting that the death penalty is an ineffective government measure that often targets minorities.
“It’s fallible, expensive, and racially biased. Just like state-level capital punishment, federal executions do not make communities safer and they do not deter future instances of crime,” she said.
“The federal death penalty has no place in our society. We continue to work with steadfastness for its abolition.”
Nate Tinner-Williams is co-founder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger.
