A group of Congress members is calling for President-elect Joe Biden to prohibit the use of the death penalty after a recent execution in Indiana sparked backlash.
In a letter sent to Biden on Tuesday, Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley urged him to “stop all federal executions, prohibit United States Attorneys from seeking the death penalty, dismantle death row at FCC Terre Haute, and call for the resentencing of people who are currently sentenced to death.”
Over three dozen members of Congress signed the letter, calling for Biden to adopt his campaign promise of creating a moratorium on the federal death penalty. The letter urged the former vice president to sign an executive order prohibiting the penalty on his first day in office.
“As you know, capital punishment is unjust, racist, and defective. The United States stands alone among its peers in executing its own citizens,” it continued. “The barbaric punishment denies the dignity and humanity of all people, but it is disproportionately applied to people who are Black, Latinx, and poor.”
The letter noted that while black people represent roughly 13% of the U.S. population, they account for 42% of federal executions.
Calls to curb the death penalty gained steam on social media platforms following the execution of Brandon Bernard, a black man who, at 18 years old, helped his friends kidnap a family before watching his friend shoot the victims in the head and assisting in the destruction of the family’s vehicle via fire. Defense attorneys argued in court and in a petition for clemency from President Trump that Bernard was a low-ranking, subservient member of the group, and they say both victims were likely dead before Bernard doused their car with lighter fluid and set it on fire, a claim that conflicts with government testimony at the trial.
Last week, executions continued with Alfred Bourgeois, who became the 10th person to be executed by the federal government under the Trump administration, the most since the presidency of Grover Cleveland in the 1890s.
In 2019, Attorney General William Barr ordered federal executions to resume, marking the first executions since 2003.
