Donald Trump wants anyone who kills someone in the nation’s capital to face the death penalty, which was abolished by the city’s government more than 40 years ago.
“Anybody murders something in the capital, capital punishment,” the president told reporters during a cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday.
“If somebody kills somebody in the capital, Washington, D.C., we’re going to be seeking the death penalty,” he said. “And that’s a very strong preventative. And anybody that’s heard it agrees with. I don’t know if we’re ready for it in this country. We have no choice.”
His statements — which are likely to trigger political and legal blowback — mark yet another escalation of his federal takeover of the capital city, which has entered a third week.
The president declared what he called a “crime emergency” earlier this month to justify his administration taking control of the city’s locally controlled Metropolitan Police Department, while deploying hundreds of armed National Guard troops alongside a surge in federal law enforcement officers.
He claimed the city is overrun with “bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” though reports of violent crime in the city have plummeted alongside national downward trends of violent crime rates.
Trump’s statements also follow signals from the administration to resume executions of federal death row inmates and aggressively seek the death penalty in future cases.
Capital punishment was repealed by D.C.’s city council in 1981, and the question of whether to resume executions was put to voters in a 1992 referendum ordered by Congress. Voters in the district overwhelmingly voted against it.
Two dozen other states do not carry out capital punishment, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Deterrence is “one of the most commonly expressed reasons” for using the death penalty, but despite Trump’s claims, evidence shows that “states that impose the death penalty are not safer than states that do not use the death penalty,” according to the center.
Typically, all decisions to seek the death penalty must be approved by the attorney general after a review from the Justice Department’s Capital Case Section.
During Trump’s first term, his administration saw the executions of 13 people within six months — the most under any president in more than 120 years, and a streak that resumed after a 17-year pause.
Hours after his inauguration in January, Trump signed an executive order directing the attorney general to seek the death penalty for every federal crime when a law enforcement officer was killed, and if an undocumented immigrant is accused of a capital offense.
The order calls on the Department of Justice to seek the death penalty in future cases “for all crimes of a severity demanding its use.”
Trump’s order also instructs the attorney general to “take all necessary and lawful action” to help states obtain lethal injection drugs to carry out more executions.
Federal prosecutors have sought the death penalty in at least two recent high-profile cases, including a case against a member of the cult-like Zizians group accused of killing a border officer, and the case against Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, the top federal prosecutor in D.C., is considering seeking the death penalty for Elias Rodriguez, who fatally shot two Israeli embassy staffers in May.
The three remaining federal death row inmates are Robert Gregory Bowers, who killed 11 people in an antisemitic attack at a Pittsburgh synagogue; Dylann Roof, who killed nine African Americans during a prayer service in North Carolina; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who helped coordinate the Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured 264 others.
The president is meanwhile weighing a radical expansion of the military’s footprint in other American cities, with plans to mobilize up to 1,700 National Guard troops across 19 states in the coming weeks to support what he claims is an effort to combat crime and illegal immigration.
