United States statutes concerning capital punishment are a snarl of conflicting jurisdictions, regulations, methods, and justifications. Therefore, even the President cannot stop executions throughout the country. Only the Supreme Court can do that. (Not to mention individual states’ governors, who can commute death sentences, and legislatures, which are randomly lurching around this crucial human rights issue.)
The President, however, could do something — something important. He could (1) commute all Federal death sentences to life imprisonment, (2) direct the Federal Bureau of Prisons to indefinitely postpone all pending executions, and/or (3) direct all Federal prosecutors to cease requesting the death penalty during the charging and arraignment stages of criminal proceedings. (Source: https://www.quora.com/Could-a-presidential-decree-be-used-to-abolish-the-death-penalty-in-the-United-States.)
Barack Obama should do all three of these things now.
The reason to do so immediately is not Pope Francis’s recent United States visit, during which he condemned capital punishment as antithetical to a pro-life (in the broadest possible terms) ethical world view. Nor is it because of the sickening screw-ups concerning ‘lethal injection’ drugs: the illegality of procurement, the bureaucratic ineptitudes, the unconstitutional suffering endured by many recipients of slap-dash death cocktails. Nor is it even because of the incontrovertible fact that there are innocent (or at least not justifiably adjudicated as guilty) people on death row, not to mention among those already executed. Nor issues of youth, mental illness, mental incapacity, racial bias, inadequate counsel . . .
It’s this.
This is a photograph of a young Saudi Arabian man, arrested and condemned for attending, at age 17, a protest in favor of Shia rights in a country dominated by Sunni fundamentalism. Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr is not accused of any violent crime. His main transgression may be that he comes from a prominent Shia family, members of which have been outspoken in their criticism of the Saudi monarchy. His uncle, Sheikh Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, was sentenced to death a year ago for for seeking “'foreign meddling' in [Saudi Arabia], 'disobeying' its rulers and taking up arms against the security forces.”
As soon as King Salman ratifies his sentence, which can happen at any moment, Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr will be decapitated, then have his rotting corpse displayed in public (the ‘crucifixion’ often referred to in news reports).
The British government has been trying to stop this outrage -- magnified by charges of torture and a rigged ‘trial' -- through official condemnation, the United Nations, and media outcry. So have France and other countries. The United States, to this point, has been officially silent in the face of its heavily subsidized Middle Eastern ally’s barbaric justice.
It’s not that Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr’s case is one-of-a-kind. Saudi Arabia lists a lot of crimes that merit execution, often grotesquely public execution: along with murder and sedition, capital offenses include apostasy, blasphemy, fornication, adultery, sodomy, carjacking, and drug smuggling. Despite being a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Saudi Arabia continues to impose the death sentence for juvenile crimes.
So do Iran, Sudan, Nigeria, and Yemen, to name a few — and these countries have similar laundry lists of capital crimes.
I’ve mentioned here a few countries that impose capital punishment on (1) ’moral’ and ‘religious’ crimes. More countries expand it to (2) ‘treason,’ which evidently can include attending an anti-government rally. Most death-penalty-friendly nations see (3) murder, aggravated rape, and in some cases, drug-dealing as meriting capital punishment.
The United States imposes the death penalty on people (usually violent, recidivist, even sociopathic individuals who are also usually poor, marginalized, mentally incompetent, outside-the-safety-net, and badly-represented) in categories (2) and (3). It doesn’t (these days) impose the death penalty on people in category (1). Nonetheless, the U.S. ranks number five on the dishonor roll of ‘executing’ countries, narrowly edging out Somalia, lagging far behind China (the champion upholder of law and order for anti-state activities as well as a host of ‘normal crimes), but within theoretical striking distance of Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia (particularly if we re-visited the moral and religious category, perhaps by revivifying The Duke of York’s Laws for the Government of the New York Colony, which counted denying ‘the true God’ and homosexual acts as capital offenses).
When there’s a well-publicized case in category (1), such as Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr’s, what standing does the United States have to protest? We cannot argue that our death penalties are more just than ‘theirs.’ Executions may be carried out on different grounds, but the grounds are arguably just as flawed. In addition, the stomach-turning grotesqueness of United States’ executions (from public hangings to Old Sparky to the latest horrors of lethal injections) makes it impossible for us to chastise our allies for unnecessary barbarity.
If the United States wants to exert moral authority successfully, through example as well as through economic clout and military action, we have to demonstrate that we’re true to these ideals at home. Our effectiveness vis-a-vis ISIS, Boko Haram (as if we really cared, which would be not really), and other rampaging death-dealing factions — and to secure allies, and to create international consensus — is connected directly to our ability to practice what we preach . . . even if we have to start changing our own practices so we can ethically condemn ‘allies’ whose values should be antithetical to ours, and to those of most countries on the planet.
The moral is embedded in the political (and vice versa). Geo-stragically speaking, the United States would be in a stronger position morally and politically if, at least on the Federal level, we abolished the death penalty. President Obama has some options here, and he should take them. Immediately.
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