The Legacy of Lynching
“ The death penalty cannot be understood by asking the question, ‘Do people deserve to die….The threshold question for the death penalty is, ‘Do we deserve to kill?’ Bryan Stevenson, Equal Justice Initiative
This week Lisa Montgomery, Corey Johnson, and Dustin Higgs will be executed. All of their scheduled execution dates were moved up so the Trump administration could execute them before President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in. Biden has said he will suspend federal executions immediately upon taking office January 20. This story was originally published on December 10, 2020.
At 9:27 PM on December 10, 2020, Brandon Bernard was pronounced dead. After 20 years on death row and despite pleas to spare his life by both the original prosecutor and five surviving members of the jury that convicted him, the Supreme Court of the United States refused to grant a stay of execution. His story is heartbreaking and his execution a miscarriage of justice, but within his personal tragedy a larger issue looms: Why was the current administration so determined to execute him, as well as others on death row?
Federal executions are exceedingly rare and an informal moratorium on federal executions has been in place since 2003. But in July 2019 U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr announced federal executions would resume, and they have, with a vengeance.
Over the past 50 years there have been only twelve federally sanctioned executions, but of those, nine have happened over the past 18 months. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Trump will leave office as the most prolific execution president of the last 130 years. If all goes according to Bill Barr’s plan, Trump will leave office having executed 13 people in less than two years, nearly a quarter of all federal death row inmates. To accomplish this Barr has actually moved up the execution dates of three prisoners, an inhumane and unspeakable act of cruelty especially as an execution during the presidential lame duck period has not happened in over a century.*
Again, why? Why is this administration so determined to kill?
Donald Trump has always been an unusually vocal proponent of the death penalty, most famously in his very public call for the execution of the Central Park Five, all of whom were later exonerated. But despite their undeniable proof of innocence, Trump has always refused to back down, and as late as 2019 stated to reporters he would never apologize and that “You have people on both sides of that.”
It is not surprising then that Trump would support the death penalty as president, but the speed, scope, and sheer cruelty of these executions boggles the mind. Although not all of the prisoners executed by Trump/Barr have been white, the majority of those executed by the time he leaves office will be prisoners of color.
Both modern policing and the death penalty have always been inextricably linked to the history of slavery and lynching. “Slave Patrols,” created to apprehend runaway slaves, predate modern law enforcement, and legal executions were promised in a bid to discourage post-Civil War lynching and vigilante justice. While public opinion has slowly turned against the death penalty and 22 states have since banned its use as cruel and immoral, government sanctioned executions continue.
Since losing the election Trump’s rush to execute death row inmates has taken an even more ominous turn: on November 27th the administration widely expanded the methods through which a death penalty can be carried out. The federal government can now employ any method for execution including hanging, electrocution, gas or firing squad, an evocation of the era of lynching is both inhumane and obvious.
Will Trump end his presidency with the hanging of a Black prisoner? Whether or not this administration actually acts on its newly created ability to choose the method of execution, the reintroduction of extreme ways to control the bodies of Black and Brown persons has entered the collective consciousness.
I live exactly one mile from where Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. We would do well to examine the relationship between Chauvin’s casually barbarous strangulation of an as yet uncharged Black man and this nation’s legacy of lynching, both extra-judicial and state-sanctioned. The answer to the looming question of “Why?” may be that these executions are being conducted as a proud and public exclamation that part of “Make America Great Again” is a modern-day return to the darkest era of our nation’s past.
Written in honor of Brandon Bernard, executed by the U.S. Government at the Federal Correctional Center in Terre Haute, Indiana on December 10, 2020.
* President-Elect Joe Biden has publicly stated he will discontinue federal executions. If Barr and Trump simply did nothing, these three prisoners would live. As death penalty activist Bryan Stevenson has repeatedly noted, “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve done.”
Thank you to Dr. Charles Watson for a passionate and edifying discussion on these topics.
Camille J. Gage is a Minneapolis based artist and writer.
