The president’s unconstitutional vision would bring a racist practice back to a city that has banned it for decades
The District of Columbia carried out its last execution in 1957. That April, it put Robert Eugene Carter to death for killing a police officer as Carter tried to flee a robbery he had just committed.
At the time, the law in the nation’s capital made the death penalty mandatory for first-degree murders of the kind Carter committed. He died in the electric chair.
Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty
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