Donna Major was shot dead in 2017 by bank robber Brandon Council, who was convicted and sentenced to death. But Joe Biden – “guided,” as he said he was, “by my conscience” – commuted Council’s sentence along with 36 other men on federal death row in the twilight of his presidency. Was this pardon for Council an insult to Donna and her grieving relatives? Donald Trump thinks so. When he took office, he quickly rescinded Biden’s moratorium on federal executions and issued an executive order instructing states to seek new charges against the 37 killers Biden pardoned. South Carolina indicted Council for Donna’s murder again last year and so he could eventually be back on death row.
The American public approves of the death penalty, the majority support it, and for their President, it’s a defining issue: one of basic common sense and a valuable contrast with bleeding-heart Democrats. But even so, despite Trump’s best efforts, the death penalty is dying out – strangled by a justice system that is unresponsive to the Americans it is supposed to serve. Just 12 executions are scheduled for this year, and, like last year, none is federal. The unmistakable trend over the last 20 years is downward.
Last year, Trump did spur some lethargic states into action. Lethal injections were administered to 19 murderers in Florida alone after Ron DeSantis signed their death warrants. But the states that responded to Trump and carried out executions last year were largely clearing out their death row cells. Many of the killers executed were sentenced up to 30 years ago, and cells that are now empty don’t look like they are going to fill up again anytime soon.
Prosecutors are pursuing capital punishment much less frequently: 23 murderers were handed the sentence in 2025 compared to a high of 325 in 1986. No cap-i-tal cas-es went to tri-al in states with the death penal-ty last year and no cap-i-tal tri-als were pros-e-cut-ed by the fed-er-al gov-ern-ment.
Last month, acting attorney general Todd Blanche disclosed that the Justice Department is seeking the death penalty against more than 40 accused killers. But none has yet gone to trial, meaning that even if they are convicted it will be many years, and many appeals, before any are actually executed. Blanche also approved firing squads, electrocution and gas asphyxiation as alternative methods of execution to address supply issues with obtaining drugs for lethal injections. Democratic politicians and many in the justice system talk not just about the moral outrage but the financial cost of death row cases – they can take four times longer than life without parole cases. But for ordinary Americans, that’s a price worth paying to see justice done. Some 52 percent say murderers should be executed, 56 percent believe execution is morally acceptable and 39 percent say execution is not used often enough, according to recent Gallup polling.
For the families of murder victims, execution may bring not just retribution but the relief of knowing the killer won’t ever inflict the same suffering on another victim. In 1988, Karen Pulley, for instance, was raped and murdered by Harold Wayne Nichols, who confessed to the killing as well as the rape of other women – and admitted he would have continued had he not been arrested. Nichols was executed by lethal injection on December 11 last year in Nashville.
“We understand taking a life is serious,” Jeff Monroe, husband of Karen’s sister Lisette, said. “We don’t take any pleasure in it. However, Nichols was a violent perpetrator who hunted his victims, stalked them and then attacked vulnerable women in the most sadistic ways. Our family was destroyed by evil that night. No punishment can ever atone for the loss of Karen’s life or the damage done to our family. Nor is there a punishment that can heal the many victims and families forever broken, battered and scarred by this man. But this is a start. We are relieved that the nightmare is over and take comfort knowing he never again will be able to hurt anyone else.” On the death penalty it’s the people versus the judiciary. Federal Judge Margaret Garnett, a Biden appointee, barred prosecutors from seeking the death penalty even for Luigi Mangione, who gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a New York hotel in 2024 in a killing caught on surveillance camera. The following year, Pam Bondi called it a “premeditated, cold-blooded assassination,” and directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty. Trump said: “He shot someone in the back. He looked like a pure assassin.” But Garnett ruled that for the death penalty, prosecutors needed to show that Mangione killed Thompson while committing another crime of violence, and that the federal stalking charges don’t fit that definition. Mangione still faces state murder charges but not federal murder charges and therefore he can’t be executed.
The public had a small and terrible window into the pain and horrorof the bereaved families
The judge conceded her ruling “may strike the average person – and indeed many lawyers and judges – as tortured and strange.” But she said she was “faithfully” applying “the dictates of the Supreme Court.”
Biden commuted the sentences of the 37 death rowers, though he made exceptions for “cases involving terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.” Excluded from the commutations were Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Tree of Life synagogue shooter Robert Bowers and Dylann Roof, who was responsible for killing nine African Americans at a Charleston church in 2015.
The truth is that Biden feared a public backlash if he pardoned those three. Most will remember exactly where they were when the killings were committed and the heartbreaking scenes that followed. They had a small and terrible window into the pain and horror of the bereaved families.
Most major US media outlets are with the judiciary on the subject of the death penalty. They view it as inhumane, a remnant of our barbaric past. The news of Biden’s pardons slipped out two days before Christmas in 2024 and garnered no real column inches and little outrage on behalf of the families of the victims. America is the last western nation to retain the death penalty, but despite Trump’s best efforts, it’s sliding toward extinction.
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