The Blood Will Flow With More Executions If Trump Is Back In Charge
The reign of trump and his MAGA supporters has always had a strong underpinning of violence and brutality, from supporting the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville, Va., to rejecting gun control laws to the deadly violence of the attack on the Capitol by trump supporters.
As trump ratchets up his bid to return to power, he is signaling his support to enhance and expand the death penalty, a position that is sure to ignite the passions of his believers. Think of the Rambo-like trump, firing off his AK-47 at those he considers to be the bad guys.
There are currently 44 prisoners on death row across the country. As part of his campaign to return to the White House, trump says that if elected, he will consider ramping up executions and even returning public executions, including firing squads, hangings and guillotines.
Could crucifixions be next? Rat torture? Elephant crushing?
Rolling Stone reported on Tuesday that if re-elected, trump is committed to expanding the use of the federal death penalty and bringing back banned methods of execution. Sources told the publication that trump spoke about televising footage of executions and returning death by firing squad, hanging, and possibly by guillotine.
“The [former] president believes this would help put the fear of God into violent criminals,” a source told Rolling Stone. “He wanted to do some of these [things] when he was in office, but for whatever reasons didn’t have the chance.”
Part of trump’s ghoulish plan is to graphically show death as a way to frighten young people away from drugs.
“We need people dying in a ditch. I want bodies stacked on top of bodies,” Trump told White House counselor Kellyanne Conway last January, according to a new book by former White House staffer Cliff Sims. “Do it like they did with cigarettes. They had body bags piled all over the streets and ugly people with giant holes in their faces and necks.”
“We need to scare kids so much that they will never touch a single drug in their entire life. Next thing you know, the kids don’t want to be ‘cool’ and smoke anymore,” trump is reported as saying in the new book, “Team of Vipers: My extraordinary 500 days in the Trump White House.”
A source told Rolling Stone that trump had “a particular affinity for the firing squad, because it seemed more dramatic, rather than how we do it, putting a syringe in people and putting them to sleep.”
“He was big on the idea of executing large numbers of drug dealers and drug lords because he’d say, ‘These people don’t care about anything,’ and that they run their drug empire and their deals from prison anyways, and then they get back out on the street, get all their money again, and keep committing crimes … and therefore, they need to be eradicated, not jailed,” trump told the Rolling Stone source.
“We’re going to be asking [for] everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts,” Trump said in his November campaign announcement. “Because it is the only way.”
Lethal injection is still the preferred method of execution in federal facilities around the nation. But rules made during trump’s presidency made federal firing squads more feasible, if lethal injections were legally or logistically unavailable.
As is his want, trump played loose with the facts when he tried to show his pseudo, macho-pedigree during a campaign rally in South Carolina. Trump told the adoring crowd that he would be like the legendary, Gen. John Pershing, who trump said, executed Muslim prisoners in the Philippines in 1927. Trump said that Pershing “caught 50 terrorists that did tremendous damage and killed many people and he took the 50 terrorists and he took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pig’s blood.”
The only problem is that the story is fiction and Pershing never executed “terrorists” with bullets dipped in pig’s blood. Sorry, trump, you are no Gen. Pershing.
Trump does have a proven taste for blood and revenge. More people were executed under his administration than in the previous 10 administrations combined. The last, Brandon Bernard, was put to death after trump had lost his reelection bid. Bernard was killed on Thursday, Dec. 10, 2020, at the Federal Correctional Center in Terre Haute, Ind. He was 18 when he was arrested, and was the youngest person in the United States to receive a death sentence in nearly 70 years.
Others executed under trump include Lisa Montgomery, a deeply mentally ill and traumatized person who became the first woman executed by the federal government since 1953. The execution of another, Wesley Ira Purkey, was delayed a day by a judge who ruled that advancing Alzheimer’s disease had left Purkey unaware of why he was being executed. The Supreme Court reversed the ruling the next day and Purkey was executed.
Including Bernard, Montgomery and Purkey, 13 people were executed under trump. Six of the death row prisoners were put to death after trump lost his bid for reelection. Before trump, there had been only three federal executions since 1963; in January 2021, trump oversaw three executions during a single four-day stretch.
After his election, President Joe Biden suspended capitol punishment by the federal government. The Justice Department is seeking the death penalty for convicted domestic terrorist Sayfullo Saipov, who steered a truck onto a bike path and pedestrian walkway in New York City on Halloween in 2017. Saipov could be executed if the Biden suspension is lifted under the next administration.
Aside from the inhumanity of it, executions are fraught with problems. There is no second chance in the event that evidence after an execution exonerates the accused.
Take Brandon Bernard, for example. More than a decade after Bernard’s 2000 trial, his lawyers claimed that prosecutors withheld critical evidence and that Bernard was a confused teenager following instructions as the youngest member of the gang. He was executed in December 2020.
In another case, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in Texas in 2004 for setting the fire that killed his three young children. Willingham was convicted because of forensic testimony from fire officials that arson experts called “junk science.” There was no public outcry. Quite the opposite was the case when a crowd at a GOP primary debate cheered the number of executions carried out in Texas under then Gov. Rick Perry.
And there was a case in Texas in 2000, when Calvin Burdine, 50, came within minutes of being executed for stabbing his gay lover to death. He was saved after a new trial was ordered because Burdine’s lawyer slept through portions of his first trial. The state of Texas had opposed Burdine’s appeal and in a retrial, Burdine pleaded guilty to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, felony possession of a weapon and capital murder and was sentenced to consecutive life sentences.
Trump’s thirst for blood and revenge is not new.
In 1989, five African American and Latino teenagers known as the “Central Park Five,” were convicted of the brutal rape and assault of a female jogger in New York City’s Central Park. Their convictions were overturned because of DNA evidence but not until each had served six and 12 years in prison.
The five young men were fortunate that then-citizen trump had no official authority at the time. Even before a trial, trump called for the teens to be executed and took out a full-page ad in the New York Daily News to “Bring back the death penalty. Bring back our police.”
Executions also have proven to be cruel and unusual punishment as defined by the Constitution. One reason has been failed technology as there have been numerous instances when lethal injection does not cause immediate death.
And then there was the case of Willie Francis, who survived an electric chair malfunction in Louisiana in 1945. After the flawed execution, a young lawyer, Bertrand DeBlanc, took Francis’ case and argued that it was unjust and cruel and unusual punishment, as prohibited in the Constitution, to subject Francis to a second execution. An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court failed, and the 18-year-old African American man was executed in 1947.
Another example of an execution gone wrong involved John Babbacombe Lee who was convicted 1885 for the murder of his employer, Emma Keyse, at her home near Torquay, England. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang. On Feb. 23, the hangman tried to execute Lee three times but each time, the trapdoor would not open. After the third try, the medical officer said it was enough and stopped the execution. Lee’s sentence was commuted to life in prison.
There also have been cases of prisoners surviving the firing squad. In 1915, Wenseslao Moguel was sentenced to death by firing squad for his part in the Mexican Revolution. He was shot nine times, including one bullet to the head and was was left to die. Moguel crawled to a nearby church were parishioners nursed him back to health. He went on to live a full life, and became something of a celebrity.
The potential for failed technology is not likely to cause trump to back away from his calls for more executions. But trump ought to be careful about what he wishes for because some of the methods of capitol punishment that he advocates may not really be so bad, relatively speaking.
Lethal injection is the standard means of execution and most believe it is the most “humane” way to kill someone. Experts say it may be the most humane method for observers who watch as the condemned man dies quietly. But it is certainly not the least painful method. The drug pancuronium bromide is used to paralyze the condemned, giving the person a false, placid, peaceful appearance while they might be suffering great pain from an improper dose of anesthesia.
Utah death row inmate Ronnie Lee Gardner asked to die by firing squad in 2010 for the 1985 murder of a defense attorney. In 1996, Gardner told a local newspaper, “I like the firing squad. It’s so much easier … and there’s no mistakes.”
Another Utah inmate in 1938 agreed to die by firing squad and an electrocardiogram showed complete heart death within one minute of the shooting.
Experts say death by firing squad is swift, relatively painless and less likely to go wrong. Lethal injections take about nine minutes to kill, if there are no complications. And things do go wrong, because of untrained personnel who don’t properly administer the anesthesia or the lethal chemicals.
The Death Penalty Research Center in Washington, D.C., reported that until the 1890s, hanging was the primary method of execution used in the United States. Delaware and Washington were the last to use hanging before both states abolished the death penalty in 2016 and 2018, and replaced it with lethal injection.
Experts say the guillotine may be comparatively, the most humane and the quickest way to die. The guillotine was developed in 1789 by Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin who proposed that the French government adopt it as a gentler method of execution as decapitation would be quicker and more humane than sword and axe beheadings.
If trump wants to invoke even more barbaric and painful execution methods, he might start with hanged, drawn and quartered, which was the punishment for high treason in England from 1351 to 1870. Criminals were attached to a wooden hurdle and dragged across the ground by a horse. The accused would then be hanged, after he was disemboweled, beheaded and quartered.
Flaying or skinning alive was the practice of cutting off a man’s skin while he still lived, a method that is traced back to 911 BC, and the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Executioners tried to keep the skin intact as they took it off, and it ended up looking like a gruesome Halloween costume.
Death by a thousand cuts, or Lingchi, is one of Asia’s most brutal execution methods. In public, a criminal was tied to a wooden frame, where the flesh was then cut from his body in multiple slices until he slowly died. The practice lasted for a thousand years before being outlawed in the 1900’s.
Crucifixion was most famously used to kill Jesus Christ. The convicted person was tied or nailed to a wooden cross, and left for a few days to die of asphyxiation, or exhaustion.
Crucifixion is rarely state policy anywhere around the world. But in Raqqa, Syria, ISIS terrorists tied the bodies of their victims to crosses with string and publicly displayed them in the square. The crucifixions were calculated to terrorize anyone who might question the regime.
Crucifixion remains a sentencing option in Saudi Arabia. After beheadings, the headless corpse is hung from horizontal bars in public places, the severed heads suspended beside them in bags. The hanging bodies often resemble crosses.
Boiling alive was a particularly gruesome method where a person was covered with, or dropped into boiling liquid. It’s one of the least common execution methods but had been used in both Europe and Asia.
The breaking wheel was one of the most common execution methods of the medieval times. The victim was attached to the wheel and his or her arms and legs were stretched and as the wheel turns, a hammer is used to smash and break the bones of the person.
Impalement was made famous by Vlad the Impaler, the Rumanian ruler from 1428 to 1476 whose favorite means of execution was to impale his enemies, while living, on a large spike. Impalement was often used for high treason, or to put down rebellion.
Elephant crushing involves using trained elephants to slowly exert pressure onto the person’s head which was tied to a stone, stopping when the head was completely crushed. Elephant crushing was used by the Romans, and multiple Asian countries.
Rat torture is considered the worst of all execution methods. A pottery bowel was filled with rats and placed upside down on the naked body of a prisoner. The pot was heated up with hot charcoal causing the rats to panic as they desperately gnawed the naked body in an attempt to escape.