If elected for a second term, former President Donald Trump would make resuming federal executions an immediate priority.
In an interview with the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper, Trump said he would lift Attorney General Merrick Garland’s years-long ban on federal executions.
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“Of course I would,” Trump said, responding to a question about whether or not he would lift Garland’s moratorium on “day one,” if reelected.
“I would have executions on major drug dealers. I would have, perhaps, the raping of a child, the killing of a police officer. I would have executions on the people that violently kill people,” the former president said.
Garland imposed the moratorium in 2021, after the Trump administration carried out an unprecedented execution spree in 2020 and 2021 at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute.
All federal executions are carried out at the high-security facility in Vigo County.
At the time, Garland said his office was studying changes to U.S. regulations during Trump’s term and concerns about the drug used to execute 13 people.
But in his interview with The Daily Mail, posted online Friday, Trump said lifting the moratorium was needed to deter drug trafficking and other crimes.
“We can have all the blue ribbon committees that we want. That's not going to stop it. So, no, I totally disagree with that,” he said.
In 2019, Trump’s opponent Kamala Harris told NPR that she supported a moratorium on federal executions, like one imposed that year in her home state of California.
President Joe Biden campaigned on abolishing the federal death penalty but hasn’t followed through during his time in office.
And this year’s Democratic Party platform makes no reference to the death penalty — for the first time in more than a decade.
