The city council of Washington, DC, abolished the death penalty more than 40 years ago but President Trump wants to make it part of his crackdown on crime in the capital. On Thursday, he signed a memo directing prosecutors to seek the death penalty in "all appropriate cases" in DC. "Capital punishment, capital city," he said as he signed the proclamation, per the Telegraph. "People come in from Iowa to look at the Lincoln Memorial, and they end up getting killed. Doesn't happen anymore," he said. "It's not going to happen. And if it does happen, it's the death penalty for the person that did it."
The memo instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi and Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney in DC, to pursue the death penalty in two ways, the Washington Post reports. They were directed to "fully enforce Federal law with respect to capital punishment" in cases where "all applicable factors justify a sentence of death," and to seek federal jurisdiction to the "maximum degree practicable" in cases where the death penalty could apply. CNN notes that unlike in any other US jurisdiction, the US attorney's office in DC brings cases in both local and federal courts. "Death penalty in Washington, you kill somebody or if you kill a police officer, law enforcement officer, death penalty," Trump said.
The city council abolished the death penalty in 1981 and voters approved the move by a margin of more than two to one in a 1992 referendum. Ryan Downer, legal director at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, said Trump was using the "false pretext of a 'crime emergency'" to attack DC's self-governance, the Post reports. "Not only are we seeking it in Washington, DC, but all over the country, again," Bondi said, per CNN. She also announced that 37 federal inmates whose death sentences were commuted by former President Biden will be sent to the ADX Florence "supermax" prison in Colorado.
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