Democrats omit call to abolish the federal death penalty from their 2024 party platform

The 2024 Democratic Party platform approved by delegates to the Democratic National Convention in August omits previous platforms’ calls to abolish the federal death penalty.

In 2016, the Democratic Party became the first major political party in the U.S. to call for an end to capital punishment in its platform. In 2020, President Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to have campaigned on an openly anti-death penalty platform. That year’s Democratic platform stated the party continues “to support abolishing the death penalty.”

After Biden was elected, his administration declared a moratorium on federal executions. But some activists have argued the president has not delivered on that promise and has defended some existing death sentences.

The 2024 platform, however, makes no mention of the death penalty or the party’s position on it. The Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, has opposed the death penalty in her current and previous political roles.

The group Democrats for Life of America, which seeks to elect what it calls “Whole Life Democrats” who oppose abortion and practices including capital punishment and assisted suicide, said in a statement Aug. 22 it was “very disappointed to learn that the anti-death penalty plank was removed from the Democratic Party platform.”

Hayden Laye, the group’s development coordinator, said, “We progressed past the need for the death penalty in America long ago. The great state of Michigan abolished the death penalty all the way back in 1846.”

Laye added the pro-life Democratic group urged Biden, a Catholic, “to commute the sentences of every single federal death row inmate to life in prison.”

In his 2020 encyclical “Fratelli Tutti,” Pope Francis addressed the moral problem of capital punishment by citing St. John Paul II, writing that his predecessor “stated clearly and firmly that the death penalty is inadequate from a moral standpoint and no longer necessary from that of penal justice.”

“There can be no stepping back from this position,” Pope Francis wrote. Echoing the teaching he clarified in his 2018 revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the pontiff said, “Today we state clearly that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible’ and the church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide.”

This story was updated Aug. 27 at noon to change the year Michigan abolished the death penalty.

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