Democrats remove abolition of the death penalty from their program for 2024

The Democratic Party has removed the death penalty from its national platform for the first time in twenty years, after having previously spoken out against the practice on several occasions.

The news came on August 19, when delegates to the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago voted to The new documentwhich will determine the party's election campaign over the next four years.

A former point from the 2020 election platform that read: “Democrats continue to support the abolition of the death penalty” was deleted, as was an entire paragraph on minimum sentences and retroactive sentence reductions.

The Democrats' retreat from the death penalty is seen as part of a general shift in criminal justice reform aimed at attracting voters ahead of the contentious 2024 general elections that could lead to major upheavals in Congress and state legislatures. The Democrats are currently projected The Republicans are in close battles for the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, which could explain their shift to the right just two months before Election Day.

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harriswho opposed the death penalty in her previous offices in California and in the Senate, did not mention the death penalty during her speech at the Democratic Party Convention – despite clear Calls from the warehouse her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, to reinstate the death penalty at the federal level.

President Joe Biden, who abandoned his re-election campaign in July, largely opposed the practice during his term. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a federal moratorium on the use of the death penalty in 2021 until a review of the Justice Department’s “policies and procedures” is completed.

In the three years since then, there has been no indication of the status of that review, although Garland has taken steps to restart federal executions, including his defense of the death penalty for the Boston Marathon bomber. Dzhokhar Tsarnaevand this year a push for the death penalty in the federal case against Payton S. Gendronwho killed ten African Americans in a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York in 2022.

Earlier this year, Rep. Adriano Espaillat– one of two prominent black Catholics in Congress – pointed out that the Biden White House has not been a vocal supporter of his Federal Death Penalty Abolition Act of 2023, which is currently sitting idle in committee.

“I wouldn't say the White House was actively trying to get people to support the bill,” Espaillat said. HuffPost in May.

Still, part of the 2024 agenda shift on criminal justice appears to be a result of promises kept. In 2022, the Biden administration eliminated disparities in sentencing rules for crack cocaine that date back to the president's policy decisions while in Congress. Last year, the U.S. Sentencing Commission recommended for the first time that federal sentencing cuts should be retroactive. (Both issues were part of the Democrats' 2020 platform, which was eliminated in the current cycle.)

But since the turnaround on the death penalty represents only the culmination of a general top-down shift in criminal justice policy within the party, advocates of a “whole-of-life approach,” a birth-to-grave ethic, say it's time for a reality check.

“We long ago left the need for the death penalty in America behind,” said Hayden Laye, development coordinator for Democrats for Life of America. “We continue to call on President Biden to commute the sentences of every single death row inmate in federal prison to life imprisonment.”

Nate Tinner Williams is co-founder and editor of the Black Catholic Messenger.

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