Trump’s death penalty pledge for Washington DC is ugly racial politics

‘The president’s promise runs afoul of longstanding supreme court precedent that says death sentences can never be mandatory.’ Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

The District of Columbia carried out its last execution in 1957. That April, it put Robert Eugene Carter to death for killing a police officer as Carter tried to flee a robbery he had just committed.

At the time, the law in the nation’s capital made the death penalty mandatory for first-degree murders of the kind Carter committed. He died in the electric chair.