Five days after Orlando Hall was executed in November 2020 in the federal death chamber, Donald Trump appeared in the White House Rose Garden for the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon ceremony. The enormous white birds, Corn and Cob, stood ridiculously as Trump wished them a “very long, happy, and memorable life.” At the Special Confinement Unit inside the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, men on death row watched news coverage on TV.

It felt like a sick joke. “He could have used his pardon/clemency powers to spare any one of the five human beings facing imminent execution,” one man later wrote to me. But the executions that had started that summer showed no signs of slowing down. Some who had watched their neighbors taken to die over the previous months still dared to hope that the next man, Brandon Bernard, might be spared. “I’m cautiously optimistic,” one of them wrote a week later. “Perhaps President Trump will show an uncharacteristic display of humanity.”

But there would be no such display. By the time Joe Biden arrived in the Oval Office in 2021, 13 people had been killed in the federal death chamber. It was an unprecedented killing spree – more executions over six months than over the previous 10 presidential administrations combined.

Collectively, the 12 men and one woman executed in Terre Haute had been convicted of heinous crimes. But they also revealed the ugly face of the federal death penalty, which is wrongly assumed to apply only to terrorists or mass murderers – the ultimate “worst of the worst.” Most were human beings whose lives had been indelibly shaped by childhood abuse and neglect. Many had lawyers who disastrously failed them. Others had an intellectual disability or severe mental illness. More than one swore he was innocent; another was executed despite playing a marginal role in the crime that sent him to die. One man was executed over the loud objections of the victim’s family.

The executions were pushed through lawlessly, in the first year of the Covid pandemic, long before a vaccine was available. Prison staff, attorneys, journalists, a spiritual adviser, and the condemned men themselves contracted the virus as the executions went on – an emblem of Trump’s recklessness, chaos, and cruelty.

But in truth, the executions were also the result of a long bipartisan project, much of it led by Biden himself. It was not just that Democrats were responsible for........

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