By Robin M. Maher, Leah Roemer

While all eyes are on the race for U.S. President, it is local races for prosecutor, state judge, legislator, and governor that will decide whether and how the death penalty is used. The President only has jurisdiction over federal death penalty cases, which currently represent about 2% of all death row prisoners and 1% of all executions carried out in the U.S. since 1976. He or she selects the Attorney General, who determines whether to seek death sentences in eligible federal cases and how to defend existing federal death sentences. The President also has clemency power for people convicted of federal crimes, including those on federal death row. 

Washington, DC: Death Penalty Information Center, 2024. 32p.

By The Death Penalty Information Center

It is a common assumption that the federal death penalty is reserved only for the most serious crimes against the country, like terrorism, that have a unique federal interest. However, an expansion of the federal death penalty in the 1990s added more than 60 crimes that carried a potential death sentence. The cases the federal government decides to pursue are rarely “exceptional” compared to the cases tried at the state level. Federal defendants also share many of the same characteristics as state court defendants: they are often poor, traumatized, mentally impaired, and disproportionately people of color. This report documents the use of the federal death penalty from its earliest beginnings through the modern day. Like many state-level capital punishment systems, the federal death penalty has been used in a racially biased manner, a conclusion that the many historical examples and data in this report confirm. The federal death penalty was a tool historically used by the government to intimidate and subjugate people of color, particularly Black and Native American communities. Today, the most active death-sentencing federal jurisdictions were once the nation’s leaders of extra-judicial lynchings, a through line of connection that links the past to the present and raises serious questions about the future use of the federal death penalty.  

Death Penalty Information Center, 2024. 36p.