In his first weeks back in the White House, President Trump took actions affecting criminal justice, including an executive order promoting the death penalty and a brief pause in federal grants.
As these early moves unfold, experts are examining their potential impact on the justice system and what they signal about the administration's long-term vision.
These issues were discussed on Tuesday in a webinar sponsored by the nonpartisan think tank Council on Criminal Justice.
In the new administration's early days, the Office of Management and Budget halted all federal grants, an order quickly rescinded after it was criticized.
As of now, the Justice Department has not suspended grants, but says it is "currently reviewing its websites and materials in accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance."
Lauren-Brooke Eisen of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law said the possibility of anticrime grants administered by the Department of Justice being suspended or cancelled is "very worrisome."
Eisen noted that federal funds support many community-based violence intervention programs, victim assistance programs and incentive bonuses for corrections officers. She believes that any cutback on aid to prison workers could worsen staffing shortages at many corrections agencies.
Eisen also expressed concern over the Trump administration's push for a more aggressive approach to the death penalty at the federal level.
On Inauguration Day, Trump issued an order that the Attorney General "pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use," including the killing of a law enforcement officer or "a capital crime committed by an illegal alien present in this country" and to encourage state attorneys general to bring capital charges in such cases.
The first Trump administration carried out 13 executions in Trump's last six months in office. Last December, President Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 of 40 prisoners on death row, leaving only three.
Vikrant Reddy of the Charles Koch Institute said on the webinar that Trump's actions and plans on criminal justice "are serious issues at a moral level and in the way we think about our system of governments, but at the practical level, they don’t have as much of a practical impact as we might think at first blush."
Reddy noted that the three federal prisoners currently on death row would likely be the only ones affected by Trump's more aggressive stance on the death penalty. Given that death row cases typically take years to resolve, Reddy was skeptical that any of the current death row inmates would be executed during Trump's term.
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