Trump's death penalty threat is dangerous to all of us

It's less about crime than consolidating control

- ANITA CHABRIA COLUMNIST

PRESIDENT Trump meets with National Guard members and others in Washington on Aug. 21.

President Trump declared Tuesday that federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., should seek the death penalty for murders committed in the capital, claiming without explanation that "we have no choice.

"That's a very strong preventative," he said of his decision. "I don't know if we're ready for it in this country, but we have it."

Trump's pronouncement is about much more than deterring killings, though. With speed and brazenness, Trump seems intent on creating a new federal arrest and detention system outside of existing norms, aimed at everyday citizens and controlled by his whims. The death penalty is part of it, but stomping on civil rights is at the heart of it — ruthlessly exploiting anxiety about crime to aim repression at whatever displeases him, from immigration protesters to murderers.

This administration "is using the words of crime and criminals to get themselves a permission structure to erode civil rights and due processes across our criminal, legal and immigration systems in ways that I think should have everyone alarmed," Rena Karefa-Johnson told me. She's a former public defender who now works with Fwd.us, a bipartisan criminal justice advocacy group.

Authoritarians love the death penalty, and have long used it to repress not crime, but dissent. It is, after all, both the ultimate power and the ultimate fear, that the ruler of the state holds the lives of his people in his hands.

Though we are far from such atrocities, Spain's purge of "communists" and other dissenters under Francisco Franco, Rodrigo Duterte's extrajudicial killings of alleged drug dealers in the Philippines (though the death penalty remains illegal there) and the routine executions, even of journalists, under the repressive rulers in Saudi Arabia are chilling examples.