In his final few days in office, Donald Trump has used the opportunity to issue a range of Presidential pardons to allies, family members, and even convicted war criminals. Meanwhile, his administration has rushed through a string of federal executions, breaking with a 130-year-old precedent that has previously prevented such actions during a Presidential transition. The recent list of pardons is twenty-nine names long, and includes former adviser Roger Stone, ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort, and former Congressman Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. These men, having been convicted of offences such as financial fraud and tax evasion, will now walk free without even the blessing of the courts of law. Even more disturbing was the execution of Brandon Barnard on December 10th. While Barnard was convicted of murder in 2000, the jurors who sentenced him then, as well as the federal prosecutor, have all recently spoke out about the unfair nature of the trial and his subsequent death sentence.

Ngozi Ndulue, from the Death Penalty Information Center, has pronounced the rush of federal prosecutions as “outside the norm, in a pretty extreme way”. Other death penalty experts and advocates have also highlighted the racialized nature of the executions: four of the five prisoners scheduled to be put to death are African American, and this, they argue, points to longstanding racial inequalities in the criminal justice system. Across the political spectrum, politicians and journalists in the U.S. have also condemned the lawless nature of Trump’s pardons. Congressman Adam Schiff (D-California), the head of the House Intelligence Committee, has labelled it a “corrupt scheme”, while Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska) has described Trump’s actions as “rotten to the core”. Franklin Foer, at The Atlantic, calls it “the triumph of kleptocracy”, declaring that the pardon of Manafort, in particular, provides conclusive proof that Trump has overseen “the symbiosis of a criminal syndicate and government”.

Amongst all this, Trump’s decision to pardon four security guards jailed for a massacre of Iraqi citizens in 2007, has gone slightly under the radar. The four men were part of a security convoy that opened fire on civilians in Baghdad; with the use of grenade launchers, machine guns and a sniper, they killed fourteen people, including two children, and injured several more. The crowd of Iraqis in Nisour Square were unarmed. Speaking to the Guardian, Adil al-Khazali, whose father Ali was killed in the attack, lamented that “justice doesn’t exist”, and pleaded for the support of the American people in overturning this decision. Dr Haidar al-Barzanji, a researcher and academic, pointed out that Trump’s decision “is at odds with human rights and against the law”.

This wave of unlawful pardons and executions have brought to the fore the contradictions and shortcomings of American democracy. Accountability is a key cornerstone of democracy, and the separation of the judicial from the executive is written into the constitution. Trump’s last-minute wave of pardons and executions have seriously undermined these principles, and while President-Elect Joe Biden’s inauguration will probably reverse this trend, establishing such a precedent may have a profound and damaging impact on the future of American democracy. The state-sanctioned executions, meanwhile, point to the wider institutional racism of Trump’s administration and the U.S. justice system in general. As evidenced by the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, defendants convicted of killing white victims are 17 times more likely to face execution than those convicted of killing black victims. The execution of Barnard – despite the existence of sufficient grounds to believe that he did not receive a fair trial in the first place – has made systemic racism in the United States, once again, plain for all to see.