In an inter­view with Bill Keller of The Marshall Project, President Obama said the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty is ​“deeply trou­bling,” and ques­tioned the man­ner in which cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is applied in the United States. While the President said that he is not opposed to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment ​“in the­o­ry,” he expressed con­cern about issues includ­ing racial bias, wrong­ful con­vic­tions, and botched exe­cu­tions. ​“We know, sta­tis­ti­cal­ly, that there’s a racial bias that has been built into the death penal­ty,” the President said. ​“We know that it is huge­ly inef­fi­cient, it takes a long time. We know that there were peo­ple who’ve been on death row that have been freed because, lat­er on, it’s been proven that they were inno­cent. We know that, in the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty, we’ve had recent cas­es in which, by any stan­dard, it has not been swift and pain­less, but rather, grue­some and clum­sy. And all of this, I think, has led me to express some very sig­nif­i­cant reser­va­tions.” President Obama said that these reser­va­tions had led him to direct the Department of Justice to ​“take a hard look” at the death penal­ty, and that ​“at a time when we’re … think­ing about how to make the sys­tem more fair, more just,” an exam­i­na­tion of the death penal­ty should be includ­ed as part of efforts to bring about broad­er fed­er­al crim­i­nal justice reform. 

(B. Keller, ​“Exclusive: Obama Calls the Death Penalty ​‘Deeply Troubling.’,” The Marshall Project, October 23, 2015.) See New Voices.

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