Well, I’ll give credit to the Trump administration for one thing. They know how to pick unsympathetic people to execute.

According to the Justice Department, the inmates to be executed include Daniel Lewis Lee, a member of a white supremacist group who murdered a family of three and threw them into the Illinois Bayou in Arkansas in 1999. Another is Lezmond Mitchell, who stabbed to death a 63-year-old woman and forced her granddaughter to sit next to her dead body on a “30 to 40-mile drive” before then murdering her as well. He was sentenced in 2003.

Also to be executed is Wesley Ira Purkey, who was sentenced in 2003 for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl, whose remains he dismembered dumped into a sewage pond. The DOJ adds he also was convicted on state charges for bludgeoning an 80-year-old woman to death with a claw hammer.

Alfred Bourgeois is now scheduled for a Jan. 13, 2020, execution after his 2004 sentencing for the torture, sexual molestation and murder of his toddler daughter. The last newly scheduled execution is for Dustin Lee Honken, who shot and killed five people, including a single mother and her 10- and 6-year-old daughters, and was sentenced in 2004.

You won’t be hearing a whole lot of people argue that these five monsters deserve to live after what they’ve been convicted of doing. So, score one for the fascists! They’re not incompetent at absolutely everything.

Of course, the death penalty has fallen out of favor globally despite the fact that there are still people in the world who us claw hammers on grandmothers and rape and murder their own toddlers. The federal government hasn’t executed anyone in the last sixteen years, but they’re still allowed to do it if they feel like it. Trump feels like it.  I know you are shocked.

Half the states in the union have either banned the death penalty or imposed a moratorium on exercising it. Of the states that don’t have a statute for killing people, only North Dakota, West Virginia, and the northern half of Maine voted for Trump in 2016. Many of the states that authorize state-sanctioned premeditated murder have found it difficult to find methods of execution that don’t amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Lethal injection is considered so suspect on that score that states have trouble acquiring the drugs. Others, like North Carolina, are stymied by the fact that doctors in the state are prohibited from participating. To get around some of these problems, Utah used a firing squad to kill an inmate in 2010.

In general, the death penalty is well on the way to being abolished worldwide.

Among countries around the world, all European (except Belarus) and many Oceanian states (including Australia and New Zealand), and Canada have abolished capital punishment. In Latin America, most states have completely abolished the use of capital punishment, while some countries such as Brazil and Guatemala allow for capital punishment only in exceptional situations, such as treason committed during wartime. The United States (the federal government and 29 of the states), some Caribbean countries and the majority of countries in Asia (for example, Japan and India) retain capital punishment. In Africa, less than half of countries retain it, for example Botswana and Zambia. South Africa abolished the death penalty in 1995.

Heinous and unforgivable crimes are committed in every country, so there are always examples of people who seem completely deserving of execution. Yet, people are coming around to the idea that it’s better to let these people live than to accept all the tradeoffs and downsides of killing them.  This is just one more area where the United States is failing to take a leadership role.