On Tuesday, former Ted Cruz staffer Amanda Walker took to Twitter to express shock over former President Donald Trump's newest suggestion that he floated at one of his final rallies ahead of Election Day.
Specifically, Trump claimed that he would have drug dealers executed within "two hours or less" by firing squad — and then send the bullet that killed them to their family.
"Have I heard him talk about the death penalty for drug dealers before. Yeah. Are drugs a scourge in society? Absolutely. But hearing the crowd cheer the notion of shooting people (what) without due process (pretty bad!) and sending a deathly memento to families (cruel) is sick," wrote Carpenter. "I know people who, on first thought, think this is an OK. Because oh, it’s not that serious, maybe we should have the death penalty for drug dealers, and we can trust Trump because he signed criminal justice reform. But again, the crowd is cheering shooting people in the streets."
"This isn’t a policy fit for a free country. It’s violence," said Carpenter. "And also, who becomes a 'drug dealer' in [this] environment. There’s no due process. How many African Americans have been pulled over out of suspicion of carrying drugs again? This. Is. Bad."
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Other authoritarian regimes have used the cover of drug crimes to conduct mass killings by the state, particularly the former Phillippines President Rodrigo Duterte, whose "war on drugs" led to the killings of 12,000 people, often extrajudicially.
In the United States, a series of Supreme Court rulings have declared capital punishment unlawful for any crimes other than murder or treason. However, police still kill suspects on the street all the time — ostensibly because they posed an imminent lethal threat to the officers or to others, but other cases, like the George Floyd killing, have led to murder convictions against officers.
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