Trump Preps ‘Bloodbath’ on Death Row As Advocates Beg Biden for Mercy

Charles Hall cast his vote for president of the United States in a 7-by-10-foot cell scattered with the detritus of his life — his guitar, materials for crocheting and beadwork, and his school books. He just got his certificate in paralegal studies — on his own dime — scoring top marks in almost all his classes. And after spending five years on federal death row for killing a fellow inmate in the mental-health ward at a medical center for federal prisoners in Missouri, he’s hungry for more education and the chance to further better himself.

Although Hall currently lives at the U.S. Penitentiary Terre Haute in Indiana, he’s originally from Maine, one of the few states that allow inmates to vote. And for Hall and his fellow 39 federal death row inmates, this is likely the most consequential election of their lifetimes. President Joe Biden halted federal executions during his time in office — promising to eventually abolish the practice — while Donald Trump’s first term as president saw 13 executions during his last months in office.

In a way, Hall’s vote symbolizes something greater: a promise of more life to live, and more things to learn. So when Kamala Harris lost in November 2024, it seemed like a whole new death sentence for Hall and his compatriots. It’s not just that Trump openly campaigned during this presidential election on expanding the use of capital punishment. Behind closed doors, the former and future president has repeatedly shared with political advisers his desire for death sentences carried out by group executions, hanging, and firing squads — if only the courts and squeamish institutions would stop standing in his way. 

“There’s a lot of fear”

Biden’s presidency provided a reprieve from federal execution for four years; he was the first president to publicly oppose the death penalty. His 2020 campaign website promised that he would “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.” During the first year of the Biden administration, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered a review of Justice Department protocols and policy on the death penalty, as well as a temporary pause on federal executions.

But there was no effort to actually eliminate the federal death penalty — and neither Biden nor Harris pledged to do so during their 2024 campaigns. Now, advocates are left simply praying that Biden will step up and fulfill his promises.

“There’s a lot of fear on federal death row,” Hall’s lawyer Angela Elleman tells Rolling Stone. “Many of those men lived through the 13 that were executed in the final six months of the first Trump presidency. They were real human beings to all of my clients who were, one by one, executed. It’s like if 13 of your friends were murdered in one year.”

As the days tick by to the inauguration, federal death row inmates are looking to Biden for a final reprieve. He already pardoned two turkeys as well as his son, Hunter. And, on Monday, criminal justice advocates sent letters to the White House begging Biden to commute the sentences of the 40 men on federal death row. Signees include religious leaders, former corrections officials, abolitionists, business leaders, prosecutors, victims’ families, mental health advocates, and more. They weighed in on different issues they see with the death penalty, including racial biases, the randomness of sentencing, and the waning popularity of the practice. 

“Joe Biden campaigned on a pledge to end the federal death penalty,” businessman Richard Branson tells Rolling Stone. He was one of 100 businesspeople to write to Biden Monday. “I appreciate that he never quite had the necessary majorities to make that happen through an act of Congress. But it’s his prerogative to commute federal death sentences, and I think this is his final chance to deliver on the spirit of his 2020 campaign commitment and prevent another execution spree like we saw during the final months of President Trump’s time in office.”

“We have a president who came in against the death penalty, against an unprecedented slate of executions,” adds Ruth Friedman, director of the Federal Capital Habeas Project, which helps connect such inmates with counsel. “[Biden and his team] know that it can happen again. The whole rest of the country has turned away from the death penalty. Executions are down, and the president-elect wants to ramp all that up.” Neither representatives for Biden nor Trump replied to several requests for comment.

An all-time low

The death penalty is older than America itself, imported by European settlers. “Criminal sentences in colonial America were largely shaped by religious views and the legacy of English legal tradition,” says Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Project. “Many early criminal codes in the colonies were deeply influenced by Puritanism and other religious ideologies that emphasized moral absolutism.” That, in tandem with the fact that the first prison wouldn’t be established until 1785 — meaning that there was nowhere to stow prisoners — meant that folks could be killed for something as petty as chopping down a tree. 

As Americans started bringing slaves to our shores, the death penalty became rooted in racism — first as slave owners executed Black people for various supposed infractions, and then as organizations like the Ku Klux Klan killed people with similar impunity. “The death penalty has for generations been a veiled extension of our national legacy of racial terror and lynchings,” says Jamila Hodge, CEO of Equal Justice USA. 

Support for the death penalty waxed and waned over the years — after the Supreme Court put a pause on federal executions in the 1970s, states created their own statutes — but that racial disparity remained. “In the modern era, when executions have been carried out exclusively for murder, 75 percent of the cases involve the murder of white victims, even though about half of all homicide victims in America are Black,” Maher says.

As of 2024, though, support for the death penalty is at an all-time low, with more than half of people aged 18 to 43 opposing the practice. That sentiment is, in part, due to the exoneration of innocent folks on death row, as well as the introduction of life-without-parole sentencing in the 1970s. Nevertheless, Trump is, predictably, unmoved. 

Another “killing spree”

During his first term, the twice-impeached former president and convicted felon and his Justice Department initiated a spree of federal executions so horrifying to criminal justice reformers and defense attorneys that many of them still refer to it as a historic “bloodbath.”

With his second term in the White House just over a month away, Trump and his lieutenants are committed to keep spilling that blood as profusely as they can. According to numerous sources — GOP lawmakers, Trump aides, longtime allies of the president-elect, conservative activists, and lawyers with close ties to Trump and the MAGA elite — Trump’s government-in-waiting has for years intended to bring back a wave of federal executions. 

Several of these sources, who’ve personally discussed the matter with Trump within the last two years, tell Rolling Stone that Trump has privately expressed firm support for a GOP-controlled Department of Justice swiftly tearing up Garland’s guidance on the federal death penalty, so Trump and his people can build upon the work they started. After all, Trump has long believed that taking a hardline, pro-death-penalty stance is a prerequisite for serving as his top federal law enforcement official. 

Three senior veterans of the first Trump administration say that there was a rather lengthy list of names that they were still hoping to put to death during Trump’s presidency. Had their work been fully consummated, Trump’s body count of federal inmates would have more than doubled, these sources add. The problem? Trump lost to Biden in late 2020, and there was no more time for the killing.

“The ‘killing spree,’ as you call it, is returning,” a Trump adviser tells Rolling Stone. “There’s a new sheriff in town, and he doesn’t think murderers and rapists should get off easy.”

And it will return, likely, rather soon. That is, unless the outgoing Democratic president does something about it. 

With the stroke of a pen, Biden could commute the sentences of current federal death-row prisoners to life behind bars. Asked by Rolling Stone if they were hopeful Biden would take this course of action after years of failing to follow through on his campaign-trail promise, an array of anti-death-penalty advocates and other activists in regular contact with the Biden White House were universally pessimistic.

“You can’t fix the death penalty”

Sabrina Butler-Smith knows all too well the toll that death row can take on a person; she’s the first woman sentenced to death in the U.S. to be exonerated. “When you are faced with dying, that’s one of the hardest things to know that’s fixing to happen,” she tells Rolling Stone. As a teen, Butler-Smith ended up on Mississippi’s Death Row in 1990 after she attempted CPR on her infant son, who died in the hospital the next day. She was released after a 1995 retrial during which a neighbor testified in Butler-Smith’s favor and a medical examiner determined her son likely died of a kidney issue. At that point, she’d already spent two years and nine months counting down the days to her own death.

Almost three decades after her release, Butler-Smith works as a communications assistant for Witness to Innocence, an organization made up of death row survivors fighting to abolish the death penalty in the U.S. Her work there has been eye-opening, she says, adding that hundreds of folks have been exonerated over the decades. “That is a lot of mistakes already,” she says. “So how do we know that we’re not making more mistakes by just constantly killing people? Why not give them life without possibility of parole? So if anything goes wrong, you can fix that. You can’t fix the death penalty when you kill someone.”

It’s too late for men like Dustin Higgs, the last of the 13 men executed during Trump’s first stint in office. He was put to death four days before Biden’s inauguration, despite his claims of innocence and the fact that he had Covid-19 at the time. He was accused of ordering the kidnapping and murder of Tamika Black, 19; Tanji Jackson, 21; and Mishann Chinn, 23 in 1996. The man who allegedly pulled the trigger was given life. 

“Even on the morning of the execution, we woke up with hope in his case,” says Higgs’ lawyer, Shawn Nolan, who describes his client as a “model inmate” who grew up poor and abused and who used his time in prison to better himself. “We had to stay in place from the Fourth Circuit. Then the Supreme Court kind of reached down in the middle of the night in Dustin’s case, as they did in many of these other cases, and they basically granted cert before judgment, which is something that the Supreme Court rarely does.” With certiorari before judgment, the Supreme Court is asked to review a case without a court of appeals ruling first; in this case, the court essentially rushed Higgs’ execution. 

Given Trump’s approaching inauguration, Nolan fears that the rest of the folks on death row will be similarly denied what he sees as due process.

“Donald Trump ran on a platform that said he is going to finish this job. He’s going to execute the remaining 40 people on federal death row,” Nolan says. “It’s frightening for our clients who are still there. President Biden has an opportunity here to fulfill the promises he made during the prior election.”

The hundreds of people who wrote to Biden on Monday haven’t entirely given up hope that the current president could commute those 40 sentences, preserving the lives of men they don’t believe deserve to die. “Mr. Hall stands ready and willing to drop all of his appeals and plead guilty to this offense and accept a life sentence without the possibility of parole,” Charles Hall’s lawyer Angela Elleman says. “He understands that he has a price to pay for the actions that he took, and he will live with that for the rest of his life. But I want to save his life. I think he has a life worth saving.”

As for Sabrina Butler-Smith, she just wants to know what happened to love in this country. “We don’t love each other anymore,” she says. “It’s so much hate and propaganda and all of these wars, all this stuff is going on now, nobody has time to know that we’re each other’s brothers and sisters. Biden, please, please commute their sentences. And if any of them are innocent, give them the opportunity to prove that.”