U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland last week announced an official moratorium on federal executions. The announcement wasn’t surprising, as President Joe Biden and Garland, a former Supreme Court nominee, have both expressed opposition to capital punishment.
In ordering the stoppage, the attorney general ordered a Justice Department review of its policies and procedures on executions, especially with regard to possible arbitrary application of the death penalty in sentencing and scheduling, particularly the execution of ethnic minorities at higher rates than their percentage of the population in prisons and in the country overall.
The order only applies to the 46 inmates on federal death row, and has no immediate bearing on the roughly 2,500 people sentenced to death in state courts, including 198 in Texas. Still, the official moratorium is a welcome chance to address whether courts and juries should be allowed to order the execution of any inmate.
Currently, wide inconsistencies exist in how that question is addressed, both across the states and within the states. Twenty-two already have imposed bans on the practice.
Texas is not one of them, but even within this state, its use has varied; in some previous years more than 30 inmates have been put to death in Texas. This year, one person has been executed and four more are scheduled to die this year, including Ruben Gutierrez of Brownsville, who was given the death sentence in May 1999 for the September 1998 killing of an 85-year-old woman during a home-invasion robbery. Gutierrez has been on death row for 22 years.
States’ rights to set their own sentencing guidelines certainly can be debated; those that have opted out of executions have expressed concerns similar to Garland’s order:
“Serious concerns have been raised about the continued use of the death penalty across the country, including arbitrariness in its application, disparate impact on people of color, and the troubling number of exonerations in capital and other serious cases,” he wrote. “Those weighty concerns deserve careful study and evaluation by lawmakers.”
A de facto moratorium had existed before, as no federal executions were scheduled during George W. Bush’s second term or Barack Obama’s entire presidency. Obama imposed an official moratorium in 2014 after a botched execution in Oklahoma. Donald Trump canceled that order, and 13 federal inmates were put to death during the final six months of his term.
Such life-or-death policies should not be left to the whims of whoever is in the Oval Office. We need a formal, consistent national policy on capital punishment, to assure consistency in sentencing. Garland’s concern over the uncomfortably large number of exonerations, and the irreversibility of executions, should inspire policy makers, if not the Supreme Court, to determine if the likelihood of executing an innocent person is worth our desire to exact the ultimate punishment on those who commit especially heinous crimes.
We hope Garland’s order leads to a frank, thorough evaluation of capital punishment, and carries over into Texas and other states that continue to use it.
