Matilda Ziegler

On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States. On the very same day, he issued 26 executive orders, many of which aim to swiftly and dramatically change certain aspects of American governance and contain faulty reasoning propped up by outright falsities.
One such order was Executive Order 14158, which is titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety.” In this order, Trump claims “our Founders knew well that only capital punishment can bring justice and restore order in response to such evil. For this and other reasons, capital punishment continues to enjoy broad popular support.”
The first contention I have with this line of reasoning is the use of the logical fallacy ad verecundiam, commonly referred to as “appeal to authority,” which, according to the Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “involves accepting as evidence for a proposition the pronouncement of someone who is taken to be an authority but is either not really an authority or a relevant authority.” In addition, the Encyclopedia warns that when experts’ opinions are not unified, it is easy for an individual to only appeal to the experts who agree with them.
In his executive order, Trump does not reference the evidence put forth by the United States Department of Justice that states the death penalty is not an effective deterrent for crime,1 or the “conservative estimate” put forth by the NIH, which states that 4.1% of those sentenced to be killed for a crime are innocent. Instead, he only points to the opinions of the founding fathers, who, as I will discuss in greater detail later in this article, are not a “relevant authority” concerning issues such as the death penalty, should not be the sole source of morality or legal or political practices and were not unified in their perception of the practice.
In addition to this line of reasoning’s reliance on the logical fallacy ad verecundiam, the two short sentences of Executive Order 14158 which I reference in this article, contain two profound untruths. Both proponents and opponents of the death penalty, and both supporters and opponents of Donald Trump, can agree that, putting the issue of logically fallacious reasoning aside, it is dangerous to base our morality or our laws solely upon the opinions on the Founders, as many of them not only committed, but fought to uphold the legality of acts that we all can agree are egregious violations of human rights, such as the enslavement of other human beings.
Firstly, even if one were to accept the faulty reasoning of ad verecundiam, not all of the founders supported the death penalty, even for crimes such as murder. For example, while Thomas Jefferson supported the use of capital punishment for the crimes of murder and treason in his tenure on the Virginia Assembly in 1799, Jefferson’s views on the death penalty appeared to shift as he aged, and he began to agree with Cesare Beccaria, who was an Italian Enlightenment-era thinker and writer who condemned both torture and capital punishment in his work On Crimes and Punishments -- according to one of 126 bills submitted to the Virginia Assembly in 1779.
In a draft of his autobiography which he wrote in 1821, Jefferson stated that “Beccaria and other writers on crimes and punishments had satisfied the reasonable world of the unrightfulness and inefficacy of the punishment of crimes by death.”
The second untruth contained within this line of reasoning is the claim that “capital punishment continues to enjoy broad popular support.” According to Gallup polls, as of November 2024, only 53% of Americans support capital punishment for convicted murderers. This support is even lower amongst Generation Z and millennials, with only 42% of Generation Z and 47% of millennials supporting the retention of the practice.
While 53% is a slight majority, it is disingenuous to say that such a small majority indicates “broad popular support” for the practice. This generational shift indicates that Americans are becoming increasingly disenchanted with the practice, which, according to the BBC, is only “persistently” carried out in North Korea, China, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Sudan, Somalia and the United States.
In part, this is due to a lack of blind trust in the opinions of those who have come before us, and an increased consideration of data-driven concerns, such as the innocence of over 4% of those executed by the United States government, the fact that the practice is not an effective deterrent, and the fact that, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s own website, it is a significantly greater financial burden on taxpayers to execute convicts rather than to imprison them for life.
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