Harris won't say whether she still wants to end death penalty

For two decades, Vice President Harris has opposed the death penalty. Now her campaign is declining to say whether she'd fight to end it as president.

Why it matters: Harris and her team have dodged questions about what she believes on several policy fronts as she's changed some of the liberal positions she's held.

Driving the news: In a shift, the Democratic Party changed its official platform this summer to remove opposition to the death penalty, which a small majority of Americans support.

• The party's platforms in 2016 and 2020 had called for ending capital punishment.
• "We will abolish the death penalty, which has proven to be a cruel and unusual form of punishment," the 2016 platform said.

But that language didn't appear in Democrats' 2024 party platform, which was drafted and voted on in mid-July, before President Biden dropped out of the race.

• Asked whether Harris supports legislation or would sign an executive order to end the death penalty, her campaign did not respond.

Zoom in: Harris has a long record of opposing the death penalty.

• As a presidential candidate in September 2019, she rolled out a criminal justice reform plan that included ending it.
• "Kamala believes the death penalty is immoral, discriminatory, ineffective and a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars," her campaign website read.

In March 2019, she praised California Gov. Gavin Newsom for halting the death penalty in California, calling it an "important day for justice."

• She added: "the application of the death penalty — a final and irreversible punishment — has been proven to be unequally applied."

Fifteen years earlier, in her inaugural address as San Francisco's district attorney, Harris vowed to "never charge the death penalty" — a promise she kept in her seven years in the office.

• Harris added some flexibility to her stance in a close 2010 campaign to be California's attorney general.
• She didn't reverse her opposition to the death penalty, but promised to "enforce the death penalty as the law dictates."
• During the 2020 Democratic primary for president, Harris' website noted that as district attorney she had "declined to seek the death penalty in the prosecution of an individual accused of killing a police officer, despite facing relentless political pressure to do so."

Zoom out: Trump is pledging to dramatically expand executions if he's elected.

• In his speech announcing his latest campaign in November 2022, Trump called for the death penalty for drug dealers.

Biden was the first president to openly oppose the death penalty despite his past support for it.

• Biden's administration considered issuing an executive order or pushing legislation to fulfill his pledge to abolish the death penalty but ultimately did not.
• Attorney General Merrick Garland paused executions in the summer of 2021 and reversed most — but not all — of the Trump Justice Department's decisions to seek the death penalty.

Between the lines: The politics of criminal justice reform have shifted since the summer of 2020, when many Democrats pushed to cut police departments' funding after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd.

• Few Democratic lawmakers are calling for that now.
• At the time, Harris was open to the idea of redirecting police funding or significantly changing policing.
• "This whole movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities," she told a radio host in 2020, CNN reported.