What can we expect at the beginning of 2018? Is the death penalty almost gone, or will the president’s support rejuvenate it?

To answer those questions, there will be four places to watch:

  1. The Counties: It’s up to local, elected district attorneys to decide whether to ask a jury for the death penalty.
  2. The States: It takes a DA and a jury to send someone to death row, but it takes a massive state bureaucracy to kill him.
  3. The Supreme Court: Trump could leave a massive legacy at the Supreme Court, especially if Justice Anthony Kennedy follows through on his plan to retire. This would affect many areas of the law, including the death penalty.
  4. The U.S. Attorney General: The federal government has successfully sought capital punishment 76 times since 1988. It will become clear in 2018 whether Sessions will try to impose capital punishment in some current cases. As attorney general of Alabama in the 1990s, he oversaw the state’s efforts to move cases toward execution.

Read the full article in the death penalty by Maurice Chammah at The Marshall Project