Having rolled back decades of precedent on abortion and reproductive health, conservatives are looking for ways to recycle the playbook that took down Roe v. Wade — and they’ve got their sights on the death penalty.

Republicans and their allies are eager to expand capital punishment, and U.S. Supreme Court cases that currently limit the crimes that can lead to executions are a prime target.

Conservatives’ eagerness to create more capital crimes is laid out in the sprawling Project 2025 manifesto, a road map for the first 180 days of “the next conservative administration.” Project 2025 urges the next administration — presumably, a second Trump White House — to throw the Justice Department’s weight into overturning the constitutional limits established by the Supreme Court.

In the meantime, Republican legislators are laying the groundwork to expand the death penalty to crimes beyond murder by passing “trigger laws” that would spring into effect once these Supreme Court Court guardrails are eliminated.

So far, Florida and Tennessee have enacted laws that allow prosecutors to seek the death penalty for child sex abuse. The laws’ proponents flaunted the contradiction with a Supreme Court decision from 2008, Kennedy v. Louisiana, which bars the death penalty for crimes other than murder based on the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.”

Similar bills have been introduced by conservatives in Congress and a handful of other states, with an eye toward challenging the Supreme Court’s Kennedy ruling just as state laws challenged Roe to overturn abortion rights.

“To the extent there is an effort by folks in the state systems to challenge Kennedy,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, “they have a very high hill to climb.”

Project 2025 shows Republicans are gearing up for the climb.

The Kennedy Precedent

The Kennedy case, decided in 2008, saw a divided Supreme Court strike down a state law that allowed a jury to impose the death penalty for rape of a child under 12 years old.

The majority’s decision built on decades of precedent interpreting the Eighth Amendment under “evolving standards of decency” — an approach that stands in firm opposition to conservative “originalist” jurisprudence.

The five-justice majority weighed heavily the risk of wrongfully executing offenders based on a child’s testimony and the documented negative effect on victims’ willingness to come forward if the death penalty is on the table for their abusers.

Under the Kennedy decision, the death penalty is........

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