Democrats remove call for abolition of federal death penalty from their 2024 party platform – Catholic Standard

The Democratic Party platform for 2024, adopted by delegates to the Democratic National Convention in August, ignores calls for the abolition of the death penalty at the federal level contained in previous platforms.

In 2016, the Democratic Party was the first major political party in the United States to include a platform calling for the abolition of the death penalty. In 2020, President Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to openly campaign against the death penalty. The Democratic Party's platform that year stated that the party continued to support “the abolition of the death penalty.”

After Biden's election, his administration imposed a moratorium on federal executions, but some activists argue the president has reneged on that promise and defended some existing death sentences.

However, the 2024 manifesto does not mention the death penalty, nor does it mention the party's stance on it. The Democratic candidate, 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 so-called “Whole Life Democrats” who oppose abortion and practices such as the death penalty and assisted suicide, said in a statement on August 22 that it was “very disappointed that the anti-death penalty item has been removed from the Democratic Party platform.”

Hayden Laye, the group's development coordinator, said: “We overcame the need for the death penalty in America a long time ago. The great state of Michigan abolished the death penalty back in 1984.”

Laye added that the Democratic pro-life group has called on Catholic Biden to “commute the sentences of every single death row inmate in federal penitentiaries to life imprisonment.”

In his 2020 encyclical “Fratelli Tutti,” Pope Francis addressed the moral problem of the death penalty, quoting Saint John Paul II: His predecessor had “clearly and firmly expressed that the death penalty is inadequate from a moral point of view and no longer necessary from a criminal justice point of view.”

“There can be no turning back from this position,” Pope Francis wrote. Echoing the teaching he clarified in his 2018 revised version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Pontiff said: “Today we clearly declare that 'the death penalty is inadmissible' and the Church is firmly determined to call for its universal abolition.”