Death Row-USA: A history of the death penalty in America

In the last few months of his tenure, Trump presided over the deaths of 13 prisoners. Here, Clive Stafford Smith takes a journey through the US’s commitment to capital punishment, telling the stories of some of the death row inmates he represented along the way.

There has been a bloodbath in the United States in the past few months. From 2003 to 2020, there had been no federal executions, and only four going all the way back to my birth in 1959. In the 230 years since records began in 1790, we had averaged only marginally more than one federal execution a year. However, in the last months of his tenure, President Donald Trump presided over the deaths of 13 prisoners, with six conducted after he lost the election. Typically for a president prone to excess, Trump broke various records, though none was particularly salutary: the most federal executions in seven months in history, and the first time a president had ever set executions after losing an election.