Article snippet: Representative Ayanna Pressley filed a bill Thursday that aims to abolish capital punishment at the federal level. The Boston Democrat announced the bill in response to the federal government’s decision to resume executing death row inmates, also announced Thursday, ending an informal moratorium on the practice that has been in place since 2010. Pressley condemned the policy as cruel “by design” in announcing her proposal, which would also require death row inmates to be resentenced. “The death penalty has no place in a just society,” Pressley said in a tweet on Thursday. In proposing the bill, Pressley took an aggressive stand against President Trump’s longstanding support for the death penalty, which she described as having a disparate impact on people of color. “The same racist rhetoric coming from the occupant of the White House — who called for the execution of the Exonerated 5, is what led to this racist, vile policy,” Pressley said in an e-mailed statement. President Trump had bought newspaper advertisements in 1989 calling on New York state to adopt the death penalty after five black and Latino teens were arrested for the assault in Central Park. Even though the five were wrongly convicted and later exonerated, Trump has refused to apologize for his scathing critiques. “It was wrong then and it’s wrong now and I am proud to introduce a bill that completely abolishes the use of capital punishment as a punitive measure,” Pressley said. The last federal ex... Link to the full article to read more