On the Outcome of the 2024 U.S. Elections
Press Statement
By Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, Executive Director of Catholic Mobilizing Network
Since Catholic Mobilizing Network’s founding in 2009, we have acted upon the knowledge that faithful Catholics have the moral voice and mobilizing power to drive meaningful change in this country to end capital punishment. Our work educating, advocating and praying to end the death penalty and promote the healing practices of restorative justice has taken place under several Administrations, and will continue no matter who is in the White House.
President Joe Biden made history as the first U.S. President to openly oppose the death penalty. While federal executions have been paused for the last four years, 40 lives are currently at stake. We know approaches to the federal death penalty can change quickly under new leadership. Regrettably, President-elect Trump has a sordid history with executions. Starting in 2020, at the heart of the COVID pandemic when states nearly halted executions, the Trump administration resumed federal executions. With a killing spree of 13 people (12 men and 1 woman) in 6 short months, these executions happened in the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. This resurgence of government-sanctioned violence at the federal level was horrifying.
More recently, on the campaign trail, Mr. Trump spoke of death penalty expansions and expeditious executions. This history informs CMN’s next steps. Now is not the time to step back from death penalty abolition.
As faithful anti-death penalty advocates, we know lives hang in the balance; we are ready to act. Our work will not be over until capital punishment has been completely abandoned in the United States. CMN will redouble its efforts to urge President Biden to commute the sentences of all 40 men currently on federal death row before he leaves office in January.
As a national Catholic organization, we are a people of faith and hope. We have spent months preparing for the year of “Pilgrims of Hope: Jubilee 2025,” a time when the Holy Father Pope Francis has called for “forgiveness, reconciliation, and an end to every form of death penalty.” Heeding his exhortation, we have begun mobilizing our national Catholic network to petition President Biden — in the spirit of mercy and the kind of justice that upholds the dignity of all life, no matter the harm one has caused or suffered — to commute the sentences of all 40 men currently on federal death row.
President Biden was the first president to campaign on abolishing the federal death penalty. Given that his lame-duck period converges with the beginning of Jubilee 2025, it is fitting that he should act on his faith and do what is squarely within his constitutional authority to do. His action could mark the beginning of the end of capital punishment in the United States.
As we move forward, we will continue to act upon the clear teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states unequivocally that “the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,’ and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.” (2267)
We know the death penalty does not deter crime or make communities safer. Like the state systems, the federal death penalty system is broken. So we will keep praying and advocating and educating and sharing restorative practices until this system of death is dismantled and our communities flourish amid a culture of life.
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Headquartered in Washington, D.C., Catholic Mobilizing Network is a national organization that mobilizes Catholics and people of goodwill to end the death penalty, advance justice solutions in alignment with Catholic values and promote healing through restorative justice approaches and practices. For more information and to join the movement, visit catholicsmobilizing.org.