WASHINGTON — Just a few months after he took office, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a moratorium to halt federal executions — a stark contrast after his predecessor carried out 13 in six months. Under Garland’s watch and a president who vowed to abolish the death penalty, the Justice Department took on no new death penalty cases.
That changed Friday as federal prosecutors said they would seek capital punishment for a white supremacist who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket. The decision doesn’t change the halt on federal executions, but Garland’s first approval of a new capital prosecution opens a new chapter in the long and complicated history of the death penalty in the U.S.
Those complexities have been on full display in recent years. President Joe Biden campaigned in part on a promise to abolish it but has taken few concrete steps to do so. The Justice Department has pulled back significantly on the use of capital punishment under Garland’s leadership, but also has shown a continued willingness to use it in certain cases.
“It’s a little hard to identify a consistent approach,” said Eric Berger, a law professor at the University of Nebraska. “This Justice Department is far more reluctant to use the death penalty, certainly than the Trump administration was, and far more cognizant of the problems, but it’s not willing to throw away the death penalty altogether.”
Robert Bowers was sentenced to death in August for carrying out the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history when he shot and killed 11 worshipers in 2018. The other case was against Sayfullo Saipov, a 35-year-old Islamic extremist convicted of maniacally racing a truck along a popular New York City bike path, killing eight people and maiming others. A split among jurors meant he was not sentenced to the death penalty.
In Buffalo, 20-year-old Payton Gendron pleaded guilty to driving across the state to target a largely Black neighborhood and carrying out the attack with a semi-automatic weapon marked with racial slurs and phrases including “The Great Replacement,” a reference to a conspiracy theory that there’s a plot to diminish the influence of white people.
