When the priest When Al Sharpton took the stage on the final night of the Democratic National Convention to introduce the members of the Exonerated Five, it was, for the briefest of moments, a nod to a reality the DNC had otherwise aggressively avoided: the countless injustices of our criminal justice system.

“Thirty-five years ago, my friends and I were in prison for crimes we didn’t commit,” said Korey Wise. As teenagers, Wise, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Antron McCray were wrongfully arrested, questioned and imprisoned for the brutal rape of a jogger in Central Park. Donald Trump famously spent tens of thousands of dollars on full-page ads in the New York Times calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty. “Our youth was stolen from us,” Wise said. “Every day we walked into the courtroom, people were yelling at us and threatening us because of Donald Trump.”

“He wanted us dead,” said Salaam, now a member of the New York City Council. The men once known as the Central Park Five are now in their late 40s and early 50s and are living proof of both Trump’s cruelty and the future he sought to destroy.

The moment was powerful. But it also revealed a tension that was present throughout the convention. All week, the criminal justice system – and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s role in it – had been portrayed as a force for good: a source of protection and justice for society’s vulnerable. Harris was praised by a parade of sheriffs, attorneys general and members of the U.S. security state as the leader who will keep Americans safe. “Crime will continue to go down if we put a prosecutor in the White House, not a convicted felon,” President Joe Biden said in his speech on Monday.

For anyone who has watched the Democrats in an election year, none of this was particularly surprising. The party has a long tradition of believing that its candidates must stand up for law and order. But Wise, Salaam, Santana, Richardson and McCray were once demonized themselves as imminent threats to American society—branded not just as “hardened criminals” but as “superpredators,” a racist and dehumanizing myth weaponized to give prosecutors the power to punish children like adults. Trump’s actions against these teenagers were certainly abhorrent and cruel. But their beliefs come from an era when politicians built their careers on criminalizing and punishing young people like them. Few have been more successful than Biden and Bill Clinton, both of whom were greeted as heroes at the DNC.

For years, Harris has presented herself as an antidote to those bad old days: a prosecutor who advocated being “smart” rather than “tough” on crime. As a candidate in the 2020 presidential primary, she promised a slew of criminal justice reforms, calling mass incarceration “the civil rights issue of our time.” As a senator, she sponsored and supported legislation to make the system fairer and more humane. But now, with the presidency within reach, Harris and the Democratic Party have simply shut down the discussion rather than seizing the opportunity to continue that work. The Exonerated Five’s appearance was bookended by another round of speeches praising prosecutors and vilifying criminals.

Unfulfilled promises

Salaam’s presence, in particular, was a reminder of a particular policy that the Democratic National Committee has abandoned. In the years following his wrongful imprisonment, he became an activist against the death penalty, telling his story to audiences across the country. (That’s how I met Salaam; we served together for years on the board of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.) As the New York Legislature debated revising a death penalty law that had been struck down by the state’s highest court, Salaam presented himself as a cautionary tale. Had the death penalty been the law the year of his trial, he might have been executed before he could prove his innocence.

But in the hours before Salaam’s speech at the convention, many Americans learned for the first time that the DNC had removed its goal of abolishing the death penalty from its official platform. The issue had previously been embedded in the party’s platform for years, with the wording in 2016 being particularly explicit: “We will abolish the death penalty, which has proven to be a cruel and unusual form of punishment,” it said. “It has no place in the United States of America.”

As a document, the platform does not always reflect a presidential candidate’s priorities or beliefs. The 2016 language, for example, was at odds with Hillary Clinton’s support of the death penalty. Still, the decision to remove any reference to the death penalty was troubling. At best, it raises questions about Harris’s stated commitment to abolishing the death penalty – a goal she not only claimed during the 2020 primaries but also put into action as a senator. At worst, it portends something much more sinister, particularly for the 40 men sitting on death row in federal courts.

This failure is particularly troubling for those who witnessed Trump’s unprecedented wave of federal executions in the final months of his presidency. Under Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr, 13 people were executed at the Terre Haute federal prison. The last three executions occurred back-to-back within a week, just days before Biden’s inauguration. The cases were emblematic of the cruelty and injustice of the death penalty. Lisa Montgomery, the only woman sentenced to death at the federal level, had a life of extreme trauma and mental illness. Corey Johnson was executed despite a Supreme Court ban on carrying out executions for people with intellectual disabilities. And Dustin Higgs, the last man to die, was executed for three murders committed by another man who later called the government’s charges “bullshit.”

Given the cruelty of Trump’s executions, Biden’s 2020 campaign promise to abolish the federal death penalty became all the more urgent — and his victory over Trump was cause for joy and relief. Against this backdrop, removing the death penalty from the DNC platform feels like an incredible betrayal. “Biden’s promise four years ago raised a set of expectations that he has so far failed to fulfill in his four years in office,” said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project in Philadelphia. “It is those raised expectations that make the lack of any mention of the death penalty so disappointing to the people who want him to make good on that promise.”

Still, Dunham does not believe the program overhaul signals a policy shift. “It’s not that they’ve abandoned their position on the death penalty. The question is, what issues do you emphasize and what do you not emphasize when you’re faced with an existential threat to democracy?”

Made invisible

If relatively few Americans remember Trump’s wave of executions, it is almost certainly because it was barely addressed by politicians on either side. The Terre Haute executions were ruthlessly carried out in the early days of the Covid pandemic, in a way that shocked even seasoned death penalty opponents, legal experts and defense attorneys. If ever there was a year when it was morally imperative to speak out against the death penalty, this was it. Instead, federal executions were completely ignored at the Democratic Party’s virtual convention four years ago.

In my correspondence with people on federal death row at the time, several criticized Democrats for remaining silent while Trump killed their friends and neighbors. “The government is killing people in the name of taxpayers, and that’s not even a big story,” Christopher Vialva wrote to me before he was executed in September 2020. He was well aware that Biden had helped expand the federal death penalty in the first place and was skeptical of his promise to abolish executions. Those who survived the executions expressed pessimism that anything would change.

The conservatives’ Project 2025 calls for executing the remaining men on federal death row. The stakes couldn’t be higher. But for all their dire warnings about the Republicans’ terrifying plan for a second Trump administration, Democrats have been conspicuously silent on this part of the plan.

For those who have witnessed federal executions up close, the news that the DNC program no longer included opposition to the death penalty was upsetting, but no reason to give up all hope. “It’s disappointing,” said activist Bill Breeden, who served as a spiritual adviser to Johnson as he stood in the execution chamber as he was killed by lethal injection. Breeden is certain that the very people who will help Democrats win — especially women and young people — are against the death penalty. But he also insists Harris must win the election. “The opposite, Christian nationalism, is fascism,” he said. As a regular visitor to federal death row, Breeden is more aware than most of the danger posed by a second Trump term. “There will be a serial killer in the White House.”

Yusuf Nur, who served as a spiritual adviser to Higgs and Orlando Hall, another man killed by the Trump administration, shared Breeden’s views. The federal government executions were traumatic for both men. “It really changed my life,” Nur said.

Nur believes the silence on the death penalty shows a lack of political courage. “They’re afraid. They don’t want to bring up anything that they think could be used against them in this election campaign. That’s basically what it comes down to,” Nur said. He questioned the extent to which Harris was directly involved in crafting the platform. “I want to give her the benefit of the doubt,” he said, but he still found it disheartening and a little ironic. “She wants to project strength and not be intimidated. But at the same time, it tells me that she is intimidated.”

Nur saw a parallel between the campaign’s avoidance of Gaza and its refusal to allow a Palestinian-American speaker at the convention. “It’s basically the same reason,” he said. But while the scale and images of Israel’s genocidal war made it impossible to suppress the issue, executions remain invisible to all but a small handful of Americans who see them up close.

This invisibility has undoubtedly made it easier for Biden to backtrack on his past promises. The same goes for the Democrats’ silence. As Vialva said of the federal government before his assassination: “They want us to stay quiet so they can operate without the public caring too much. They keep us secret.”