Washington – President Donald Trump said Tuesday that his administration will seek the restitution of the death penalty for cases of murder in the capital of the nation, a policy that has wanted to expand throughout the country.
“If someone kills someone in the capital, Washington, DC, we are looking for the death penalty,” Trump said during a long cabinet meeting at the White House.
Trump suggested that such policy would potentially dissuade people to commit murders, saying that capital punishment is a “very strong preventive.”
“We have no choice. Then in DC … if someone kills someone … is the death penalty,” said Trump, who made it clear that other states would have to make their individual decisions about the problem.
The president’s comment occurs in the midst of the aggressive efforts of his administration in recent weeks in DC to reduce crime in the city controlling the activities of application of the law, as well as deploying and putting together the national guard troops to patrol the streets.
Even before taking office in January, the president made it clear that he wanted to expand the death penalty to more states. The day he swore, Trump signed an executive order that expressed the desire to increase capital punishment throughout the country. He ordered the Attorney General to follow the death penalty “for all the crimes of a gravity that demanded its use” and encourage state general prosecutors and district prosecutors to adopt policies related to the death penalty.
The American prosecutor Jeanine Pirro, the federal prosecutor in DC, announced this month that the Department of Justice is considering looking for the death penalty in the case of Elias Rodríguez, who fatally fired two employees of the Israeli embassy in May. That case, however, is a federal case and Trump could face obstacles that try to impose the death penalty in other cases of DC murder.
The United States prosecutor and the office of the mayor of DC Muriel Bowser did not immediately respond to requests for comments on Trump’s death penalty comment.
In general, the crime in the city has decreased by 8% during the last year, including a 15% decrease in homicides, according to the data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department. Homicides have also fallen since 20 years in 2023, which registered 274 murders, to 102 so far this year.
Trump and the White House have questioned the crime statistics published by the city, and NBC News previously reported that the Department of Justice is investigating whether the data were manipulated so that the crime rate seems lower.
According to the non -profit organization of the Death Penalty Information Center, the Supreme Court annulled the death penalty in DC in 1972 and the DC Council formally repealed it in 1981. DC residents later voted in 1992 not to restore capital punishment in the city. The organization says that 27 states still use the death penalty and 23 states do not have politics in their books.
While more people have supported the death penalty for those who are convicted of murder in recent years, according to Gallup, the percentage of people who support the policy has decreased drastically in recent decades and the percentage against it has increased. The greatest support that has received the death penalty in the last 85 years was in 1994, when Gallup registered 80% how to support it in cases of murder, compared to 16% that did not favor it.
