UN Human Rights Experts Urge U.S. Federal Government to Take Steps to End the Death Penalty

Describing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as an ​“inher­ent­ly flawed” and ​“abhor­rent prac­tice,” United Nations human rights experts have called on President Joe Biden to take action to end the death penal­ty in the U.S.

In a state­ment issued from the Office of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland on March 11, 2021, the rights experts said the death penal­ty ​“serves no deter­rent val­ue and can­not be rec­on­ciled with the right to life.” A press release from the High Commissioner’s office crit­i­cized the United States for car­ry­ing out the death penal­ty despite ​“vio­la­tions of due process guar­an­tees, such as lack of access to an effec­tive legal defense, and in igno­rance of essential facts.” 

The human rights experts — which includ­ed Agnès Callamard, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extra­ju­di­cial, sum­ma­ry or arbi­trary exe­cu­tions, and Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on tor­ture and oth­er cru­el, inhu­man or degrad­ing treat­ment or pun­ish­ment — are part of the Special Procedures pro­gram of the Human Rights Council, an inde­pen­dent fact-find­ing and mon­i­tor­ing mech­a­nism that address­es human rights issues around the world. 

“We call on President Biden to urgent­ly grant clemen­cy to the 48 indi­vid­u­als cur­rent­ly on death row for fed­er­al crimes,” the experts said, and ​“fur­ther urge the President, as well as mem­bers of Congress, to strong­ly sup­port leg­isla­tive efforts to for­mal­ly abol­ish the death penal­ty at federal level.

“In the mean­time, President Biden should con­sid­er all oth­er pos­si­ble fed­er­al-lev­el actions includ­ing direct­ing the Department of Justice to stop seek­ing the death penal­ty and with­draw­ing notices of intent to seek the death penal­ty in ongo­ing cas­es,” they said.

The experts said U.S. exe­cu­tions ​“have repeat­ed­ly result­ed in degrad­ing spec­ta­cles” and crit­i­cized the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty nation­wide for ​“dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly impact[ing] African-Americans and peo­ple liv­ing in pover­ty.” Citing ​“thou­sands of indi­vid­u­als on state death rows across the coun­try” and sev­er­al pend­ing state exe­cu­tion dates, they urged that “[a]ction must also be tak­en to address death penal­ties hand­ed down at the state level.”

Among the actions the admin­is­tra­tion could take, the experts sug­gest­ed “[t]he pos­si­bil­i­ty of link­ing some forms of fed­er­al fund­ing to alter­na­tive sen­tenc­ing and a ban on the sale and trans­port of chem­i­cals used in lethal injections.”

The oth­er mem­bers of the expert group that issued the state­ment were: Dubravka Šimonovic, U.N. Special Rapporteur on vio­lence against women, its caus­es and con­se­quences; Elizabeth Broderick (Chair), Dorothy Estrada-Tanck, Meskerem Geset Techane, Ivana RadačIć, Melissa Upreti (Vice Chair), U.N. Working Group on dis­crim­i­na­tion against women and girls; Gerard Quinn, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the rights of per­sons with dis­abil­i­ties; Leigh Toomey (Chair-Rapporteur), Elina Steinerte (Vice-Chair), Miriam Estrada-Castillo, Mumba Malila, Seong-Phil Hong, U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention; and Ahmed Reid (Chair), Dominique Day, Sabelo Gumedze, Michal Balcerzak, Ricardo A. Sunga III, U.N. Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent

2,494 men and women were on state death rows or faced cap­i­tal retri­als or resen­tenc­ings in states across the U.S. on October 1, 2020, accord­ing to the Death Penalty Information Center’s death-row data­base and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund quar­ter­ly Death Row USA report for Fall 2020. 

On his 2020 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign web­site, then-can­di­date Biden pledged to ​“work to pass leg­is­la­tion to elim­i­nate the death penal­ty at the fed­er­al lev­el, and incen­tivize states to fol­low the fed­er­al gov­ern­men­t’s exam­ple.” In a six-month peri­od between July 2020 and January 2021, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion car­ried out 13 exe­cu­tions, includ­ing six dur­ing the pres­i­den­tial tran­si­tion peri­od. The 10 fed­er­al civil­ian exe­cu­tions in 2020 were the most in any cal­en­dar year since Grover Cleveland’s sec­ond pres­i­den­cy in 1896 and marked the first time in U.S. his­to­ry the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment exe­cut­ed more pris­on­ers than all of the U.S. states com­bined. The six tran­si­tion-peri­od exe­cu­tions were the most in U.S. history.

According to the 2020 Amnesty International glob­al report on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in 2020, the U.S. con­duct­ed the sixth most exe­cu­tions record­ed in any nation in 2019, trail­ing only China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt. Execution totals were unavail­able for North Korea and Vietnam. All of the oth­er most pro­lif­ic exe­cut­ing nations are gov­erned by authoritarian regimes.