The prosecutor Jeff Gray asked for death for Charlie Kirk’s murderer.
After the death of the young Charlie Kirk and the arrest of the murderer Tyler Robinson, Donald Trump invoked the death penalty. A similar request for the accused was made in the first hearing of validation of the arrest by the American prosecutor Jeff Gray, an iron republican elected to the primary in Utah (in America the prosecutors are political charges, elected by citizens or directly by the President of the United States). It is not the first time that the former Tycoon expresses itself in this sense. It is part of a long political journey: to add hatred to hatred, feed that spiral of violence that continues to poison America. There is a red thread that crosses his public career: the belief that the capital penalty is the only effective deterrent against the most heinous crimes.
In 1989, in a New York marked by crime, he bought entire advertising pages on New York Timeson the Daily News and on New York Post To ask for the restoration of the electric chair in the state. The opportunity was the rape of a jogger in Central Park. Even without appointing the five African American and Hispanic children arrested, then recognized innocent, his intervention was interpreted as an attack on them.
After Manhattan’s attack in 2017, when an Islamist extremist killed eight people overwhelming them with a van, he tweeted: “New York terrorist should receive the death penalty!”. In 2018 and 2019 he extended his invocation to drug dealers: “In the countries where there is a death penalty for drug traffickers, the problem does not exist”, he declared, citing Singapore and China (where mass executions are performed with blow to the neck in the stadiums and families of the convicted of the condemned they must pay the price of the bullet). Moreover, in China and Singapore the drug dealers continue to be there. However, the most concrete turning point came in 2020 during its first term: the Department of Justice, on the impulse of the White House, resumed the federal executions suspended for 17 years. Thirteen people were executed in the final semester of his first mandate, a record in modern times. The line has not changed after its return to power. In January 2025, on the first day of the new mandate, he signed an executive order to “restore” his federal capital penalty, imposing the Department of Justice to ask for it in the most serious cases, including the murders committed by irregular immigrants. Currently in the United States the executioner is in force in twenty -seven states on fifty, from Texas to Florida, from California to Pennsylvania. Latal injection is the main method, but alternatives such as the electric chair in South Carolina, the shotgun in Oklahoma and Utah, the nitrogen hypoise in Alabama and Louisiana and even the hanging persist, such as in New Hampshire. The executions are increasing: seventeen in 2020, thirty in 2025. Yet the number of murders does not decrease in relation to death sentences. The two variables observe researchers from the Death penalty information center are totally independent. While America is twisted in this blood justice anxiety, instead of wondering if the uncontrolled sale of weapons is not the basis of this spiral of violence that the country is poisoning, Europe has taken another path for centuries: that of civilization. Already in 1764 Cesare Beccaria wrote Crimes and penaltiesin which he condemned the capital penalty as useless and inhuman. Today in Europe the executioner has remained unemployed. The last state of the Council of Europe to ban it was Russia in 2009, with a moratorium extended by the Constitutional Court. Belarusia remains the only European country to still practice capital execution, at least on paper. So when we put on the scale the advantages and disadvantages of America, this complex and contradictory continent celebrated by Tocqueville, remember that barbarism in those parts has not yet been defeated and that it even undergoes a regression process, as in the rest in many countries of the world (in Arabia there is even, in addition to the beheading, the crucifixion!).
Trump will brand it as a political flag, often with the support of many evangelical shepherds, a proof of strength in front of his electorate. But America who invokes death as justice appears increasingly far from Europe that banned it with the Enlightenment reason. It is the distance between those who believe that violence extinguishes themselves with other violence and those who, for over two centuries, have understood that the law must not be transformed into revenge. As for Christians, in the US there is also a different tradition, such as the one linked to the American Dorothy Day. The founder of Catholic Worker Movement he already wrote in the 1930s that the death penalty was the “Logical consequence of a society that refuses the Gospel of Mercy.
