In December 2024, Joe Biden, then in the last weeks of his presidency, made a final move to block the incoming Trump administration from resuming the execution of federal prisoners. With his clemency power, Biden transmuted the capital sentences of nearly all the men on federal death row to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The sense at the time was that he had, on capital punishment at least, checked Trump. But over the past year, just how protected some of those men are from execution has become increasingly uncertain.

At the courthouse in Conway, South Carolina, solicitor Jimmy Richardson, the county prosecutor, announced in September that he would seek a second death sentence for one of the resentenced men, Brandon Council. Conway is a small town outside Mrytle Beach, with just under 30,000 residents. (Of the 40 men on death row last year, three cases were out of Conway.) In 2017, Council walked into CresCom Bank and shot and killed both the teller, Donna Major, and her colleague, Kathryn Skeen. He stole $15,294 and a sedan and was arrested two days later. Charged and sentenced to death by a federal jury once, Council now faces, under the jurisdiction of South Carolina, the unusual prospect of a second death sentence for the same crime.

That Biden commuted those federal sentences at all was somewhat surprising. He had campaigned on ending the death penalty, but once in office he sat on the issue, only turning to it a month after Donald Trump had won his second term. He left three men on death row, all three convicted of mass murder on federal hate crimes and terrorism charges.

Biden’s commutations seemed to infuriate Trump. Trump had allowed 13 people to be executed in the last seven months of his first term, overseeing more executions than any president in the preceding 124 years—since Grover Cleveland’s presidency. Trump wrote on Truth Social in response to Biden’s decision that, once in office, he would direct the Justice Department to “vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children.” Much like the bombing of small boats, masked agents, and chartered flights to foreign prisons, execution is another stage for the administration’s strongman story of protection against an abstract, regenerative........

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