Bystanders record local Metropolitan police, who with assistance from FBI, ATF, HSI and U.S. Secret Service agents recovered a handgun from a vehicle, weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard and law enforcement to patrol the nation's capital to assist in crime prevention, near the Convention Center in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 27, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
President Donald Trump is calling for the death penalty to be ramped up in Washington, D.C., and he wants to use the federal courts to do it. But according to legal experts and political scientists, his proposal is problematic for a variety of reasons.
Kimberly Wehle, a University of Baltimore law professor and former federal prosecutor, maintains that local homicides in the U.S. capital are a matter for the D.C. Council — not the federal courts. And according to Austin Sarat, a political science/jurisprudence professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, Trump's proposal is badly out of step with legal precedent.
Sarat, in an op-ed published by The Guardian on August 29, explains, "The District of Columbia carried out its last execution in 1957. That April, it put Robert Eugene Carter to death for killing a police officer as Carter tried to flee a robbery he had just committed. At the time, the law in the nation's capital made the death penalty mandatory for first-degree murders of the kind Carter committed. He died in the electric chair."
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The Amherst College professor added, "If Donald Trump has his way, it won't be long before Washington, D.C. sees a return of capital punishment. During a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, (August 26), the president promised to bring it back."
Sarat notes that Washington, D.C. "abolished capital punishment entirely, a decision ratified by the votes a decade later."
"That means that the U.S. attorney's office, under the supervision of the Department of Justice, not local officials, would be in charge of turning the president's plan into reality," Sarat notes. "And no one should be surprised that the president wants the death penalty to be part of his plan to rid Washington, D.C. of crime. On the first day of his second term, (Trump) issued an executive order directing the attorney general to 'pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use.' Does that mean all murders and all murderers?"
Sarat continues, "In 1976, the (U.S.) Supreme Court made clear that it did not think so. The Court struck down a North Carolina statute that made the death penalty mandatory for first-degree murder."
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In that 1976 ruling, Justice Potter Stewart, a Republican appointee of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, wrote, "The history of mandatory death penalty statutes in the United States, reveals that the practice of sentencing to death all persons convicted of a particular offense has been rejected as unduly harsh and unworkably rigid."
Sarat argues, "When the time comes, it will be up to the courts to defend the Supreme Court's precedent on mandatory death sentences and to put a stop to the racial politics that restoring it to D.C. would represent. In the meantime, it is well worth remembering that the last person executed there was a 28-year-old Black man who killed a white police officer and was subject to a mandatory death penalty."
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Austin Sarat's full op-ed for The Guardian is available at this link.