14 September—President William McKinley died on this day in 1901 in Buffalo, New York, having been shot eight days earlier by possibly insane anarchist Leon Czolgosz. (Czolgosz was tried and convicted of first-degree murder and electrocuted on 29 October. Swift justice, to say the least.)

No surprise that political assassinations have been carried out at least since the Bronze Age, about four millennia ago.

So Tyler Robinson, the kid who fatally shot St. Charlie Kirk last week, is being held on suspicion of what Utah and some other states call aggravated murder and is expected to be formally charged this week. But with aggravated murder? Really?

Doubtless the MAGAs and other Trumpublicans who run Utah want Tyler Robinson to be tried and convicted of aggravated murder because it’s the only crime in that state with a possible death penalty. Problem is, killing Charlie Kirk doesn’t qualify as aggravated murder.

Utah’s aggravated murder is like Connecticut’s old capital murder, now called murder with special circumstances, which, however, only carries the state’s maximum penalty of life without the possibility of parole rather than the more appropriate death penalty. But killing a celebrity—and like it or not Charlie Kirk was a celebrity, however odious and reprehensible a hate monger he may have been—rather than a public official, for instance, and not involving other heinous specifics in the crime just is not aggravated murder no matter how you look at it. So killing Charlie Kirk was just plain old-fashioned standard murder, probably in the first degree.

That’s not to say the system of justice in Utah can’t be perverted in order for the state—i.e., the prosecutor in this instance—to prevail. It happens all the time. Everywhere. Not the least in Connecticut.

Moreover, it’s not unlikely that Donald Trump’s politicized, weaponized, blatantly corrupt Department of Justice flunkies have been conspiring since St. Charlie’s martyrdom to contort and distort the law in order to come up with an excuse, however lame, to prosecute Tyler Robinson for a federal crime in order to seek the death penalty. Two problems with that are, first, that murder of a celebrity, even a friend of Trump, is not a federal crime, and, second, even if it were, it wouldn’t in itself be a capital offense enabling the death penalty to kick in.

Even if Trump could get federal law changed to allow Tyler Robinson to be executed, the U.S. Constitution, for one, prohibits ex post facto laws. And Trump couldn’t do that by executive order. Anyway. Either. But when did any laws ever stop Donald Trump from getting his way?