President Joe Biden made history in 2021 when he became the first president to publicly oppose the death penalty. It wasn’t a position he spoke about often but tucked into his campaign platform was a promise to work with Congress to abolish the federal death penalty through legislation and incentivize states to do the same.
In July 2020, the Trump administration ended a 17-year de facto moratorium on federal executions and killed Daniel Lewis Lee. Over the next several months, former President Donald Trump and then-Attorney General William Barr raced to execute as many people as possible before leaving office. Dustin Higgs, a Black man scheduled to be executed on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, was the thirteenth and final person to be killed. Ultimately, he died in the early hours of the following day while suffering from COVID-19, just four days before Biden’s inauguration. Like many of the people executed before him, there were extensive unresolved legal issues in…