The United States is far from the only modern state to use capital punishment, but it is in the minority worldwide and the extreme minority among its own allies in the West. Barr and Trump are long-standing capital punishment advocates, but ProPublica recently reported that their killing spree was planned before the president took office. In a deposition last year, Associate Deputy Attorney General Brad Weinsheimer described how Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, got the ball rolling on federal executions shortly after Trump assumed office, with staffers like Matthew Whitaker assigned to put together a drug protocol. That Barr, Sessions, and their underlings got Trump to kill so many people, so fast, and with such opacity around the sourcing of the drugs involved, particularly the controversial phenobarbital, bespeaks a deep, strange problem in America.
In fact, capital punishment is the inheritance of the plantation, Chammah writes, not the frontier—a convincing idea that many of this nation’s judges seem not to share. In 2016, Chammah notes, Judge James Oakley of Burnet County, Texas, responded to the murder of a police officer by a Black San Antonian with a Facebook post reading, “Time for a tree and a rope.” Though a state commission made Oakley undergo “racial sensitivity training,” and he apologized, he couldn’t help but add that “there was never anything racial about my comment.”
“Between 1877 and 1950,” Chammah notes, “more than four thousand African Americans were lynched in the United States.” That the Supreme Court accepted Texas’s argument that execution is a preventative measure against lynching rather than its simple continuation suggests that each fulfills the same desires in the public. Lynching and capital punishment are different cultivars of the same species. “Even in the 1960s,” Chammah writes, “many Texas prisons retained the feel of the slave plantations they had replaced. (In some cases they were actually on the same land.)”