The Trump administration, which carried out a slew of federal executions this year after a 17-year hiatus, has slated five more prisoners to be put to death between now and President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration, two of them within days of the transfer of power. These will be the most federal executions ever carried out during a presidential transition period.

Like the administration's sprint to gut environmental protections and scramble foreign policy, the killings bear all the hallmarks of a sore-loser president trying thwart the policy goals of his successor — in this case, Biden's stated opposition to the death penalty. In polls, Americans increasingly share Biden's opposition.

Since the 1970s, more than 170 former death row inmates have been exonerated through DNA technology and other methods. Little doubt remains that innocent people have been executed and that such travesties are inevitable as long as capital punishment is in place. That may explain why public support for the death penalty, which stood at around 80% in the 1990s, has fallen to just above 50% — the lowest in half a century — and drops to well below half when respondents are asked to choose between death or life in prison without parole for murderers.

State policies reflect that shift, with a half-dozen legislatures abolishing capital punishment in recent years. Of the 28 states whose laws still allow the death penalty, more than a third haven't carried out an execution in a decade or more. The federal government hadn't conducted a single federal execution since 2003 until Attorney General William Barr started his spree this year with, so far, eight executions. If all 13 executions are carried out as scheduled, President Donald Trump would have meted out more death to American prisoners in his four years in office than any presidency since Franklin D. Roosevelt's 12 years in office.

Biden, like much of America, has abandoned his previous support of the death penalty, concluding that any chance of killing innocent people is unacceptable. "Because we can't ensure that we get these cases right every time," he tweeted last year, "we must eliminate the death penalty." He's right. It's no longer the complicated question of whether murderers deserve to die — many clearly do — but the simpler ethical question of whether imposing that particular form of justice is worth the wrongful executions that almost inevitably would accompany them.

This certainly isn't the only topic on which Trump has trashed the tradition of deferring to the incoming president on major policy issues during the transition, but there's something especially galling about rushing inmates to the execution chamber as a parting raspberry to his successor. Trump has shown the depths of his character in myriad ways in recent weeks, but this mad dash of death marks a new low even for him.

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