Trump makes no move on promised death penalty for those who kill police officers

Donald Trump promised in 2015 that one of the "first things" he would do if elected president would be an executive order to impose the death penalty for people who kill police officers. He renewed his call for it in 2018, but we still haven't seen any movement to turn this campaign pledge into policy.

One explanation for that might be the slew of legal barriers.

Experts say that the president doesn't have the power to create penal laws by executive order, and the Supreme Court ruled in Woodson vs. North Carolina in 1976 that mandatory death sentences are unconstitutional.

Sheri Johnson, a law professor at Cornell University, said that because a president can't impose the death penalty on Americans by executive order, Congress would have to pass a statute to do so, and any such statue would face a constitutional challenge that it exceeds the power of the federal government. 

"Moreover, it is conservative justices who are most hesitant to expand federal powers, so it is hard to see where the support would come from," Johnson wrote in an email. 

Then there's the fact that the death penalty is largely a state issue. (Capital punishment is currently authorized in 28 states.)

The death penalty is legal at the federal level, and the U.S. government announced in 2019 that it would resume federal executions after a 16-year lapse. But sentencing is a matter of congressional legislation, not presidential decree. And only in limited circumstances can a homicide be charged as a federal crime, such as when the victim is a federal law enforcement officer or federal official. Otherwise, it would be a state charge.

Johnson told us that even if a state were to try to pass a mandatory death penalty for killing police officers, such a statute would likely be struck down, because death sentences require individualized determinations of mitigating and aggravating circumstances.

"Many states now don't have a death penalty at all, so there is no way I see that a president would be able to force or pressure all states to adopt such a statute," she wrote. "It is true that states can make the killing of a police officer a death-eligible offense, but states that do have a death penalty already make such a killing death eligible — though not mandatory for the reason that they could not do so. Taken together, these things make any such promise a nonstarter."

Trump promised something that doesn't fall under the jurisdiction of the president or the executive branch, and he has taken no action on it. We rate this Promise Broken.