What might the second Trump term mean for the death penalty?

The question in the title of this post defies any quick analyses, especially since there may be a number of different stories to unpack related to death penaly law (both constitutional and statuory) and death penalty administration (prosecutions, sentences and executions).  In addition, though a President and his Justice Department can have the most direct impact on federal capital punishment, there are also various ways that federal officials (and federal politics) can impact state capital justice systems.  And yet, all these nuances aside, we can still simply matters by saying a second Trump term likely means more use of, and attention on, the death penalty.

This lengthy new NBC article, headlined “Trump wants to expand the federal death penalty, setting up legal challenges in second term,” overview some the federal capital punishment issues.  Here are excerpts:

Throughout his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump signaled he would resume federal executions if he won and make more people eligible for capital punishment, including child rapists, migrants who kill U.S. citizens and law enforcement officers, and those convicted of drug and human trafficking….

While it remains unclear how Trump would act to expand the death penalty, anti-death penalty groups and criminal justice reform advocates say they are taking his claims seriously, noting the spree of federal executions that occurred during his first term….

At the tail end of Trump’s first term, 13 federal inmates were put to death — even as the pandemic led states to halt executions because of Covid concerns in prisons. The cases included the first woman executed by the federal government in nearly 70 years; the youngest person based on the age when the crime occurred (18 at the time of his arrest); and the only Native American on federal death row.

No president had overseen as many federal executions since Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s, and the U.S. government had not executed anyone for more than 15 years until Trump revived the practice.  His then-attorney general, William Barr, had said that the federal government “owed it to victims to carry out the sentence imposed by the justice system.”

President Joe Biden had campaigned on passing legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, but pulled back on that in office. Instead, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a moratorium in 2021 to review the federal execution protocols….  Meanwhile, the Justice Department under Biden and Garland has not sought the death penalty in federal cases that could have warranted it, and has even withdrawn death penalty sentences in about two dozen cases that it had inherited….

There are currently 40 inmates, all men, on federal death row, according to the nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center. They include gunmen responsible for mass shootings in South Carolina and Pittsburgh and the man convicted in the Boston Marathon bombing….

More than 40 federal laws provide for the death penalty, with nearly all dealing with murder or an illegal act that results in death.  Whether Trump would expect federal prosecutors to seek death in cases that don’t explicitly involve murder — for instance, the rape of a child — remains to be seen, but the Death Penalty Information Center notes that a 2008 Supreme Court ruling prohibits the execution of people convicted of raping children and says it’s unclear if the use of the federal death penalty would be constitutional in certain cases in which someone was not killed.