Donald Trump issued pardons and commuted dozens of sentences for people incarcerated for drug crimes while he was in the White House.
His administration also hailed the passage of the First Step Act during his presidency as a rare bipartisan achievement towards criminal justice reform.
But during his presidency, and throughout his 2024 campaign for the Republican nomination for president, with a string of violent, provocative statements from inside the White House and to crowds at campaign rallies, he has called for executing people convicted for drug crimes.
In an interview with Fox News host Bret Baier that aired on 20 June, the host noted that Mr Trump’s demands to kill drug offenders would have applied to people like Alice Marie Johnson, a high-profile formerly incarcerated person who was pardoned by Mr Trump during an Oval Office event in 2020.
“She’d be killed under your plan,” Mr Baier said.
“Huh?” Mr Trump said after a pause.
“No, no, no. Oh, under that? Uh, it would depend on the severity,” he said. “She can’t do it, OK? By the way, if that was there? She wouldn’t be killed, it would start as of now. So you wouldn’t go to the past.”
He also stated that Ms Johnson would not have committed any crime, if she knew that a potential sentence, if convicted, was her death.
In 2020, one day after she praised his administration during the Republican National Convention, Mr Trump granted a full pardon to Ms Johnson, who had served 22 years of a life sentence on charges related to cocaine distribution and money laundering.
He had already commuted her sentence in 2018, but he issued a surprise pardon – effectively deleting her conviction and restoring her rights as a citizen – the day after she delivered a supportive speech at the RNC.
“We’re going to give a full pardon. We’re going to do it right now. That means you have been fully pardoned. That’s the ultimate thing that can happen. That means you can do whatever you want in life and just keep doing the great job you’re doing,” he told her during an Oval Office event.
Kim Kardashian had also personally lobbied him to take up her case at the White House.
“Some say you do the crime, you do the time. However, that time should be fair and just,” Ms Johnson said during her RNC speech in 2020. “We all make mistakes. None of us wants to be defined forever based on our worst decision.”
Republican officials and right-wing pundits have relied on “tough-on-crime” messaging – after 2020 uprisings against police violence, a steady stream of sensational crime coverage across media networks, and the villainizing of so-called “progressive prosecutors” in Democratic-led cities.
GOP candidates competing with Mr Trump for the 2024 nomination are now turning to the former president’s attempts at criminal justice reform, zeroing in on Mr Trump’s support for the First Step Act. The law shortened some federal prison sentences, gave judges alternatives to mandatory minimum penalties, and retroactively applied 2010’s Fair Sentencing Act to eliminate racial disparities in prison sentences for cocaine possession.
Ron DeSantis called the First Step Act a “jailbreak bill.” Mr Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence said “we need to take a step back” from the law.
Meanwhile, after praising China’s policy of capital punishment for drug traffickers while he was in the White House, Mr Trump has directly called on members of Congress to approve the death penalty for the same crimes in the US in his 2024 campaign.
“Under Democrat [sic] control the streets of our great cities are drenched in the blood of innocent victims,” Mr Trump said at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania weeks before formally declaring his candidacy last year.
“We would solve that problem so fast” he added. “I’m calling on Republicans and Democrats immediately to institute – to get to Washington and institute the death penalty for drug dealers. You will no longer have a problem.”
Mr Trump’s push to execute drug dealers would appear to violate the US Constitution as affirmed by the US Supreme Court, which has held on multiple occasions that death sentences for non-lethal offences are considered cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the 8th Amendment.
