WASHINGTON COUNTY, Pa. – President Donald Trump’s recent push to impose the death penalty for all murder convictions in Washington, D.C., has sparked sharp criticism from legal experts and was deemed unconstitutional under decades of precedent. The announcement came as Trump cited an “increasing” crime rate in the capital, the same city where he previously deployed the National Guard.
The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) said Trump’s plan to penalize already imprisoned murderers “would violate almost 50 years of legal precedent and overwhelm Washington, D.C.’s legal system.”
DPIC’s executive director, Robin Maher, spoke with The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, and other outlets, addressing whether Trump can impose mandatory death sentences in D.C. Maher said the plan would roll back legal precedent by half a century, overburden the courts, and demand extraordinary taxpayer resources because death penalty cases are more expensive and time-consuming than other criminal proceedings.
Maher also pointed to the additional regulations and decades-long appeals that accompany death penalty cases. “Last year, for example, Texas executed a man for rape and murder 18 years after he was first sentenced to death,” she said. “Not long after, a Texas judge declared a mother on death row innocent in the death of her 2-year-old daughter, 17 years after she was sentenced to death.”
As a precaution, Maher warned that even with D.C.’s declining crime rate, “there would still be enough of those crimes, enough prosecutions, to completely overwhelm the legal system” if Trump were to pursue the death penalty in every possible case.
In a PBS NewsHour interview, Maher added that Supreme Court precedent has found mandatory death sentences—similar to what Trump appeared to propose—unconstitutional.
The DPIC has monitored the death penalty for more than 30 years, compiling data, background, and analysis to help inform the public and media. The group has tracked Trump’s actions since his first-day executive order on the death penalty.
Maher cautioned that Trump’s efforts, while possible, face steep legal hurdles. “I think we can read this executive order as a wish list, as directions to his attorney general regarding the priorities that he or she should set when they take office,” she said. “But there’s going to be a great deal of resistance to many of these efforts. And again, they are contradictory to well-settled law and procedure, so I don’t think any of this will be easy to do.”
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