Reporting by Josh Meyer, USA TODAY Network
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump announced Aug. 26 that anyone who kills a person in the nation’s capital will be charged with the death penalty, a vow that will likely ratchet up the already heated national debate about capital punishment.
Trump was talking about reducing crime in Washington at his Cabinet meeting when he pivoted and said, “If somebody kills somebody in the capital, Washington, DC, we’re going to be seeking the death penalty.”
“And that’s a very strong preventative. And everybody that’s heard it agrees with it,” Trump added. “I don’t know if we’re ready for it in this country, but … we have no choice.”
Trump also said other states, which are not under the sway of the federal government as much as the District of Columbia, would have to decide on their own whether to follow suit.
Trump made restoring the death penalty a major campaign issue last fall, and his Attorney General Pam Bondi has been pursuing more use of the death penalty in federal prosecutions.
Mixed responses to Trump’s call for death penalty in DC
Trump supporters immediately rallied around the president.
“The death penalty is the just response to the most heinous of crimes,” said Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas. “President Trump is right to put it on the table for murderers in DC.”
Critics slammed Trump’s comments, including Death Penalty Action cofounder Abraham Bonowitz.
“President Trump knows the federal death penalty exists for certain crimes, and he should know that the people of Washington, DC, rejected capital punishment by referendum several decades ago,” Bonowitz said. “Trump is not a king, and he certainly cannot be trusted with the power to execute citizens.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment about whether it has specific plans to implement what Trump called for in the meeting with his Cabinet secretaries.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson said the administration had “nothing to add” to the president’s comments “at this time,” including a White House “Rapid Response” post on X of Trump making the comments.
‘This shameful era ends today’
In one of her first actions just hours after being sworn in in February, Bondi issued a directive reviving the federal death penalty and lifting the moratorium on federal executions.
Singling out the Biden administration for blame, Bondi said those “at the very highest levels of the Department failed to seek death sentences against child rapists, mass murderers, terrorists, and other criminals.”
“More appalling, the Department’s leadership sought − and received from former President (Joe) Biden − commutations for the death sentences of 37 murderers that Department of Justice prosecutors had tirelessly secured over the past three decades. … This shameful era ends today.”
A week earlier, Trump also issued an executive order aimed at similarly ramping up capital punishment, entitled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety.”
In July 2024, on the campaign trail, Trump said that if elected, he would instruct the Department of Justice “to dismantle every gang, street crew and drug network in America.”
As part of that effort, Trump also called for the death penalty for drug dealers and human traffickers.” Trump has also vowed to invoke the Alien Enemies Act while calling for the death penalty for migrants who kill Americans.
At the time, 21 U.S. states had the death penalty, 23 did not have the death penalty and six had put executions on hold. After a 2008 Supreme Court case held that the death penalty should only be used for the worst offenses, no one is on death row for a crime other than murder, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Still, the United States is in the global minority of countries that use capital punishment.
A strong aversion to the death penalty in DC
The District of Columbia has not had an execution since 1957 and has not reinstated the death penalty since 1981, when it was repealed by the City Council, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a national nonprofit organization providing data and analysis on issues concerning capital punishment. The organization said district residents voted 2 to 1 against the death penalty in a 1992 referendum ordered by Congress.
Some of the district’s prosecutions are especially notable. Charles Guiteau was executed in 1882 for assassinating President James Garfield, the center said. Mary Surratt, the only woman executed in the district, it said, was hanged by the U.S. military in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln.
Robert Carter, convicted of fatally shooting an off-duty police officer who pursued him after Carter robbed a dry cleaner’s, was executed in 1957. The jury in the case, the center said, “recommended mercy for Carter, but the law at the time mandated a death sentence for a conviction of first-degree murder.”
Trump has strong DC ally in top DOJ prosecutor Jeanine Pirro
Even though homicide is usually considered a local crime in most jurisdictions, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia is unique in the nation in that it serves as both the local and the federal prosecutor for the nation’s capital.
Trump has a strong ally in Jeanine Pirro, his Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who is the region’s chief Justice Department prosecutor.
A staunch conservative, Pirro was a Fox News host and longtime assistant district attorney in Westchester County, New York, before being elected judge and then district attorney there.
Pirro has expressed an interest in using the death penalty in Washington cases, including against the man charged with killing two young adults at the Capital Jewish Museum in May. The grand jury indictment against Elias Rodriguez includes federal hate crime and murder charges, and was laid out in a way that makes a case for seeking the death penalty, Pirro said Aug. 7.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump calls for death penalty for anyone charged with killing someone in Washington, DC
Reporting by Josh Meyer, USA TODAY Network