What if President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s push for more executions ends up helping America abolish the death penalty?
After this wild October, the question is not so far-fetched.
Hegseth wanted Americans to watch the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, convicted of murdering 13 people at Fort Hood. But some of the sharpest objections came from conservatives.
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., called streaming the execution “beyond disgusting,” adding: “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do.” Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, warned, “A civilization erodes when it cultivates an appetite for executions as a form of entertainment.”
A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found 80% of Americans opposed the broadcast, including 64% of Republicans. Trump canceled the livestream on Oct. 15. The execution itself remains scheduled.
That distinction matters. Opposing a spectacle is not the same as opposing capital punishment. But look at what else happened this year.
On Oct. 20, Republican Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey commuted Toforest Johnson’s death sentence to life without parole.
Johnson was convicted of murdering a sheriff’s deputy. His conviction stands, but the local district attorney, former judges and others had questioned the evidence.
“I had concerns there was not enough direct evidence to carry out the most serious punishment, death,” Ivey explained. She did not declare him innocent. She recognized that execution leaves no opportunity to correct a mistake.
Then there is Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. As a state senator in 1981, he voted to restore Ohio’s death penalty. After decades as a prosecutor, attorney general, U.S. senator and governor, he called for its abolition in June.
“The moral justification I had,” DeWine said, “no longer exists.” He concluded the death penalty does not deter murder and described the toll that decades of appeals exact on victims’ families. Ohio has not executed anyone since 2018. Bipartisan repeal legislation is pending, although legislative opposition remains.
Those are not identical positions. They do, however, raise questions conservatives have particular reasons to ask: How can we distrust government with ordinary powers yet trust it never to execute an innocent person? And what does justice require when punishment becomes a spectacle?
There is also a constitutional reason to pay attention.
Fifty years ago, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court allowed executions to resume. But the Eighth Amendment still forbids cruel and unusual punishment. In Atkins v. Virginia, the Court prohibited executing people with intellectual disabilities. In Roper v. Simmons, it prohibited executing people for crimes committed before age 18.
Both rulings considered America’s “evolving standards of decency,” including the number of states rejecting those practices and the direction of change.
Today, 23 states have abolished the death penalty. Ten more retain it but have gone at least a decade without carrying out an execution. That is 33 states — two-thirds of the country — where executions have been abolished or absent for at least 10 years.
Just three more abolition states would make a majority. That would not automatically make capital punishment unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has no simple 26-state rule. But the growing rarity of executions is evidence future justices would have to confront.
The cruelty, meanwhile, is impossible to dismiss. In September, Tennessee’s attempt to execute Christa Pike by lethal injection failed. She survived, and Republican Gov. Bill Lee halted the state’s remaining scheduled executions pending an independent review.
September also marked 15 years since Georgia executed Troy Davis. I stood outside that prison. Seven of nine key witnesses had recanted or changed their accounts. William Sessions, FBI director under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, urged Georgia to stop. It did not.
I helped lead Maryland’s successful abolition campaign in 2013, making it the first state south of the Mason-Dixon Line to end capital punishment. I learned then that this cause can unite people who disagree on almost everything else: believers in redemption, skeptics of government and people determined not to risk an irreversible injustice.
Virginia became the first former Confederate state to abolish the death penalty five years ago. More executions are taking place in some states now; today’s Court may be unwilling to overturn the punishment. Hope should not be confused with certainty.
But this October brought something real: Republicans rejected an execution broadcast, one governor spared a man amid doubts, and another is asking his state to end executions altogether.
Those are not the same steps. They are steps in the same direction.
Maybe Trump and Hegseth have inadvertently done something abolitionists could not: made more Americans look squarely at what government killing means.
Fifty years after executions resumed, that may help us finally bring them to an end.
Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.
