Dr. Daniel LaChance, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow in Law and the Humanities and Associate Professor of History, was quoted in a mid-December 2024 U.S. News & World Report article about whether President Biden would seek to commute the sentences of remaining prisoners on federal death row. A week after that article, the Biden administration announced that 37 of those 40 prisoners would have their sentences reclassified to life without parole.

LaChance is a legal scholar working at the intersection of American legal and cultural history, criminology, and literary studies. His books include Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Crimesploitation (Stanford University Press, 2022), co-authored with Paul Kaplan. Read an excerpt from the U.S. News & World Report article below along with the full piece here: “Biden Made a Promise to End the Federal Death Penalty. Will He Bend to Pressure to Empty Death Row?“

“He’s very much made the death penalty a symbol of what he represents,” Daniel LaChance, an associate professor at Emory University who wrote the book “Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States,” says of Trump.

“It’s pretty shrewd on his part because we know that support for the death penalty is concentrated amongst white Protestant Republicans – a key and core part of his base,” LaChance says.

Overall, about 53% of Americans support the death penalty for someone convicted of murder, according to polling from Gallup. Support for the death penalty for a convicted murderer has been trending down in recent decades after reaching a historic high of 80% in 1994, according to Gallup.