President Trump said Tuesday the federal government would seek the death penalty for murders committed in Washington, D.C.
“Anybody murders something in the capital, capital punishment,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday. “Capital, capital punishment. If somebody kills somebody in the capital, Washington, D.C., we’re going to be seeking the death penalty. And that’s a very strong preventative.”
The District of Columbia hasn’t executed anyone since 1957, after Robert Carter was convicted of fatally shooting an off-duty police officer.
CBS News reported that previously, D.C. had mandatory death sentences for first-degree murders, a policy the Supreme Court later voided in the 1972 case Furman v. Georgia when it found that the death penalty was being applied in an unconstitutionally arbitrary manner. Four years later, the high court allowed capital punishment to be reinstated with clearer sentencing guidelines. The D.C. City Council, however, abolished the death penalty in 1981.Â
Washington went 12 days without a murder during the federal government’s crime crackdown, a streak broken early Tuesday with the killing of a 31-year-old man in Southeast D.C., according to the Metropolitan Police Department.
Vice President JD Vance, a day earlier, said the capital typically averaged one murder every other day, before commending the president on saving 6-7 lives since deploying the National Guard
On his first day in office, the president signed an executive order directing the attorney general to seek the death penalty in cases involving the murder of a law enforcement officer or “a capital crime committed by an alien illegally present in this country.”
