Project 2025 will propel the United States backwards by dismantling rights and protections that are intended to enable all Americans to live their lives safely and freely. Project 2025 will weaponize the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to promote failed and punitive criminal legal strategies that have harmed Black communities for generations. Furthermore, Project 2025 will undermine the mission and jurisdiction of the DOJ, which houses the Civil Rights Division and was established in 1870 with a mandate to uphold the rule of law, keep the country safe, and protect civil rights.2
In contravention of these goals, Project 2025 will turn the mission and purpose of the Department of Justicei on its head by:
Former LDF Attorney and current Executive Director of the Innocence Project, on Buck v. Davis3
Project 2025 will establish an extremely punitive approach to justice, based on the erroneous assumption that harsher punishments lead to less crime.4 It calls on the DOJ to do “everything possible” to execute anyone currently held on federal death row.5 It will also expand the number of cases that qualify for a death sentence.6 Although this expansion of the death penalty violates existing Supreme Court precedent,7 Project 2025 will urge the administration to pursue this policy “until Congress says otherwise through legislation.”8
Numerous cases and data underscore racial discrimination in capital punishment. For example, in 1997, a Texas jury convicted Duane Buck of capital murder.9 During the capital sentencing phase, Mr. Buck’s defense attorney called a psychologist to testify about whether Mr. Buck would be violent in the future.10 This psychologist testified that a person’s race is among the pertinent factors in determining their propensity for violence—and that Black men, like Mr. Buck, were statistically more likely to be violent.11 The trial prosecutor exploited this testimony and used it to argue in favor of a death sentence.12 The jury sentenced Mr. Buck to death.13
Nearly two decades later, in 2016, LDF argued on Mr. Buck’s behalf before the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Davis.14 The Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s decision, holding that Mr. Buck was denied the effective assistance of counsel when his own attorney called a witness that provided racially biased testimony that contributed to his death sentence. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts stated, “Our law punishes people for what they do, not who they are. Dispensing punishment on the basis of an immutable characteristic flatly contravenes this guiding principle.”15 Mr. Buck was removed from death row and resentenced to life in prison in October 2017.16
Chart: Thurgood Marshall Institute. Source: DEATH ROW U.S.A. Summer 2024, Legal Defense Fund. Created with Datawrapper.
One of LDF’s most high-profile death penalty cases in recent memory, Buck v. Davis successfully challenged the death sentence of Texas death row inmate Duane Buck, whose death sentence was a blatant product of racial discrimination. In February 2017, the Supreme Court condemned the injection of racial bias into Mr. Buck’s capital sentencing hearing and by a vote of 6-2, declared that Mr. Buck’s trial counsel was constitutionally ineffective for introducing the “toxin” of racial bias into Mr. Buck’s capital sentencing hearing.
Project 2025 will increase the use of the death penalty,17 despite the stark racial disparities throughout the criminal legal system, including the administration of capital punishment. The death penalty is disproportionately applied against Black individuals,18 especially in cases involving white victims,19 and an increase of its use will only exacerbate that injustice. Currently, 38.1% of people on death row in federal prisons are Black.20 In state prisons, 40.6% of people on death row are Black, 14.3% are Latinx, and 42.0% are white.21 According to the census, 13.7% of the U.S. population is Black, 19.5% is Latinx, and 75.3% is white.22 Black people are vastly overrepresented on death row at the federal and state level, and the overrepresentation of people of color on death row has increased every decade since 1980.23
The criminal legal system is prone to wrongful convictions and extreme sentences that are achieved through constitutional errors rendering the legal proceedings fundamentally unfair,24 as demonstrated by Buck v. Davis and countless other cases. There are several racially biased decision-making points that result in the overrepresentation of Black people and other people of color on death row. Cases with white victims are more likely to be investigated and assigned a capital charge.25 Additionally, jurors of color are systemically excluded from participating in death penalty trials.26 The racial composition of the jury pool is influential for trial outcomes because research shows that less diverse juries convict and sentence Black people to death at much higher rates than white people.27 In some states, a unanimous jury is not required for a death sentence.28 In 2023, Florida’s governor signed into law a bill that allows people to be convicted and sentenced to death with only eight consenting jurors—the lowest number in the United States.29 Nearly sixty percent of current death row sentences in Florida are from non-unanimous juries.30
In addition to enforcing and expanding the discriminatory practice of capital punishment, Project 2025 will also broaden the crimes for which individuals can be given the death penalty, exacerbating racial disparities even further. The charge of rape has a long history of differential responses based on the race of the victim. During slavery, courts applied the death penalty for rape overwhelmingly against Black men where the victim was a white woman.31 The rape and attempted rape of a white woman was a capital offense in most states in the South, yet no white man was ever executed under these charges.32 In contrast, raping Black, enslaved women was a legal right of the white man who considered them his “property,” and rape by a different white man was considered a less serious offense.33
The death penalty plays a key role in racialized vengeance and the exertion of social control over Black communities. Project 2025’s call for the enforcement and expansion of the death penalty is particularly dangerous for Black people and members of other marginalized groups.
iNotably, the Department of Justice is the only federal agency with a value in its title.
Death Row USA includes data on death row populations by state, executions, statistics on race and gender, pending death penalty cases, and more in states with the death penalty. Death Row USA also includes data on federal death row populations and executions by the U.S. government and the U.S. military.
One of Project 2025’s most significant proposals will terminate the use of consent decrees, which are a primary legal mechanism through which the federal government ensures that state and local jurisdictions, agencies, and private actors comply with the U.S. Constitution and federal law.34 These agreements are legally binding and court-enforced, aiming to remedy violations of federal law. In cases related to protecting the safety of Black people, consent decrees are an important tool when it is necessary to compel prison and jail systems or police departments to remedy systemic violations of law.35 Nationwide, there are nearly two dozen active consent decrees involving law enforcement and prison or jail practices, including in cities such as Baltimore, Maryland; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Los Angeles, California.36
Project 2025 will have the federal government review all consent decrees and “seek to terminate any unnecessary or outdated consent decree to which the United States is a party.”37 Efforts to undermine or end consent decrees, and to refuse to enter into such agreements in the future, are essentially efforts to eliminate a critical tool that is necessary to force intransigent law enforcement agencies to remedy systemic unlawful police conduct.38
Ending consent decrees will have real consequences. Following investigations that reveal unlawful conduct by law enforcement agencies or prison or jail systems, including patterns or practices of racially discriminatory conduct, the DOJ has historically negotiated consent decrees to correct and prevent additional unlawful conduct.39 Attempting to terminate consent decrees will remove an important accountability measure and permit unlawful and abusive conduct by governmental and private actors to continue unchecked, especially those who are resistant to other forms of oversight and reform.40 Currently, the DOJ has not yet reached agreements to remedy the systemic unlawful conduct that its investigations found in the police departments of Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, Minnesota among others. A decision to not seek court-enforced agreements to remedy agencies’ unlawful conduct will signal an abdication of the DOJ’s duty to enforce civil rights laws against police departments, placing Black communities at even greater risk of discriminatory and oftentimes violent policing.
Project 2025 will require the DOJ to terminate “unnecessary or outdated” consent decrees;41 however, the DOJ does not have the authority to unilaterally end consent decrees. Instead, the DOJ will have to request that the court end each consent decree, and the court would then accept or reject the request.42 Even so, if the DOJ follows Project 2025’s suggestion to ignore its responsibility to hold law enforcement agencies, prison and jail systems, and other institutions accountable for systemic constitutional violations against Black community members, it will send an undeniably harmful signal and encourage actors and institutions to engage in unlawful conduct without fear of any consequences or repercussions.
Two years after the killing of Michael Brown, and after a DOJ investigation revealed a pattern of First and Fourth Amendment violations, excessive force, and due process violations, the City of Ferguson entered into a court-enforceable consent decree to “implement reforms to bring about constitutional and effective policing.”60
As a result of the reforms enacted under the consent decree, Ferguson’s ticket issuance declined by 91.8% and warrant issuance by 95.3% between 2014 and 2023.61
In the wake of the killing of Freddie Gray, the DOJ launched an investigation into the Baltimore Police Department that revealed a pattern of unconstitutional stops, excessive force, retaliation against constitutionally protected expression, and “severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches, and arrests of African Americans.” The report resulted in the City of Baltimore agreeing to enter into a consent decree.62
The consent decree monitor reported that incidents of bodily force declined from 2,427 in 2018 to 1,183 in 2021, and incidents of pointing a firearm decreased from 461 to 209 during the same period.63 The monitor also reported that the quality of the Baltimore Police Department’s misconduct investigations had markedly improved, with seventy-two percent of 2022 investigations marked as “very good” or “excellent,” compared to just twenty-three percent in 2018.64 Due to technology delays and data limitations, the public currently does not know what, if any, progress has been made in reducing racial disparities in stops or searches.65
The DOJ opened an investigation into the Louisville/Jefferson County Metro Government (Louisville Metro) and Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) in 2021. The DOJ had reason to believe that Louisville Metro and the LMPD engaged in a pattern of conduct that deprived people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law, and their investigation confirmed as such. The DOJ found that Louisville Metro and LMPD deprived people of their rights by unlawfully executing search warrants without knocking and announcing, violating the rights of people engaged in protected speech critical of police, and discriminating against people with behavioral disabilities when responding to them in a crisis, among other actions.66
The DOJ, Louisville Metro, and LMPD reached an agreement in principle in 2023, but a final agreement has not yet been reached and filed in court.67
Following the killing of George Floyd, the DOJ opened an investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) and the City of Minneapolis. The DOJ found that the MPD used excessive force, unlawfully discriminated against Black and Native American people in its enforcement activities, violated the rights of people engaged in protected speech, and (along with the City) discriminated against people with behavioral health disabilities when responding to calls for assistance. The City and MPD entered into an agreement in principle to resolve the DOJ’s findings through a court-enforceable consent decree.
An agreement between the DOJ, the City of Minneapolis, and MPD has not yet been reached and filed in court. A decision to eliminate the use of consent decrees could result in an agreement solely between the parties and not enforced by a court in this case, meaning no independent body would ensure that the provisions of the agreement are implemented without further litigation.
Project 2025 will require the DOJ to pursue mandatory minimum sentences under the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA) and support legislation that increases sentences for individuals.43 Project 2025 erroneously claims that criminal justice reforms have hampered law enforcement and led to “catastrophic increases in crime—particularly violent crime—nationwide.”44 Based on this false premise, Project 2025 will have the DOJ more doggedly pursue mandatory minimums. This proposal ignores the demonstrated harms of such punitive sentencing, particularly for Black people.
Mandatory minimums have resulted in exponential growth in the number of people incarcerated and the length of incarceration, without any documented improvement in public safety.45 Black communities bear a disproportionate weight of these harms. In a 2019 study of felony sentencing in New York City, Black and Latinx people were more likely than white people to be arrested for and convicted of charges with mandatory minimums.46 Black people comprise fifty-eight percent of all arrests with mandatory minimums and fifty-nine percent of all convictions with mandatory minimums, while white people make up seven percent of both.47 An analysis of federal data on felony misdemeanor convictions from 2017 to 2021 revealed that Black men received sentences 13.4% longer than white men convicted of the same crime.48 Research shows that federal prosecutors are sixty-five percent more likely to make mandatory minimum charges against Black as compared to white defendants and more than half of the Black-white disparities in sentencing can be explained by these prosecutorial charging decisions.49
Evidence also suggests that mandatory minimums make communities less safe. A 2017 study revealed that a 1.0% increase in the prison population was associated with a 0.28% increase in violent crime and a 0.17% increase in property crime.50 Additionally, taxpayers and communities suffer when carceral systems grow. While jails and prisons directly cost taxpayers $80 billion annually, a study by the Institute for Justice Research and Development at Florida State University estimated that incarceration generates an additional ten dollars in social costs for every dollar of financial costs.51
Project 2025 will restart the China Initiative, a DOJ effort that resulted in the surveillance and harassment of people of Chinese heritage under allegations of economic espionage, and will promote the aggressive enforcement of immigration laws and other laws against immigrants. Project 2025 states that its goals for the DOJ “will require creative use of the various immigration and immigration-related authorities.”52 Reinstating the China Initiative and aggressively enforcing laws against immigrants is likely to increase violence and hate crimes against Asians, Black people, and other communities of color. The previous investigations launched through the China Initiative failed to achieve their purported aims and instead increased surveillance of Asians.53 Prior anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric by officials has been correlated with increases in hate crimes against racial minorities, particularly against Black people.54 Additionally, research suggests that exposure to xenophobic rhetoric increases expressions of prejudice.55 This can prove deadly: in 2022, a mass shooter who targeted a Black community and murdered ten Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, explained his motivations as drawing from the racist “great replacement theory.”56
Taken together, Project 2025’s counterproductive “public safety” proposals to expand the racially discriminatory death penalty, undermine key federal levers for law enforcement accountability like consent decrees increase sentencing through mandatory minimums, and promote xenophobic policies will make Black communities and other vulnerable groups less safe. In summary, these measures threaten to exacerbate systemic inequalities, further marginalizing already at-risk Black communities while failing to deliver genuine improvements in public safety.
LDF’s Framework for Public Safety offers a starting point for a new paradigm of public safety that centers the dignity and humanity of individuals and communities while creating conditions to reduce crime on a sustained basis and avoid the harms associated with the current system of law enforcement. Moving from reimagining public safety to making it a reality begins with changing our choices and investing in solution-oriented outcomes.
All people—including Black people—deserve communities where they can work, learn, play, thrive, and live with dignity, respect, and safety. However, the current system of law enforcement disproportionately targets and harms Black communities. LDF’s “Framework for Public Safety” articulates an affirmative vision for an effective, equitable, and humane system of public safety that respects the inherent dignity of all people through three critical strategies: (1) building a corps of trained, unarmed civilian responders;57 (2) expanding and institutionalizing restorative justice programs;58 and (3) increasing investments in community resources and ensuring economic security.59
