Update Feb 15, 2026:

Yesterday, several European nations reported their conclusion that Navalny was poisoned with compounds from an Ecuadorian dart frog. This group includes Germany. I was wrong before about the German medical examiners' conclusions, and haven't been able to find a source for what I said. I don't know why I thought they said he hadn't been poisoned.

The reason I'm not just deleting this policy is that we still have problems with prison conditions here. We might as well still name a law after him, although I'm not willing to suggest a law protecting dissident presidential candidates from poisoning. It doesn't seem like the time to make that a domestic concern.

I did genuinely believe that Germany had said this, possibly having imagined some news articles. I'm not invested in whether Russia killed him or not and have no reason to doubt their official reports. If you read the original mistaken version below, what you'll see is that if he hadn't been poisoned, it would have been useful as rhetorical leverage for saving lives in the US.

Prison conditions here are often life threatening and dangerous in unnecessary ways that amount to an additional, extrastatutory sentence. The January 6th defendants all complained about it. Joe Exotic ran for president from jail to protest a prison so hot that the bars burned him. George Santos begged for a pardon until he got one because they stuck him in a dark hole for weeks.

These right wing influencers don't worry about the conditions once they get out though, so we can't name the reforms after them. They wanted to be let out because they were too good for the prison, or the law, and they don't think the prisons should be improved. If anything, they think prisons should be worse but only made available to their enemies. They see prison conditions as a weapon for their political faction to use, whether it kills their opponents or not. That is reason enough to name the law after Navalny.

Original version from early 2025:

My position on Navalny is that while he was persecuted, he did have a medical condition that lead to his death. It was the German doctors who said he wasn't poisoned that last time, not the Russian ones. As president, I would introduce Navalny's Law, which would be a set of reforms to prison supervision and medical care.

Prison deaths from medical neglect are a crisis in the US. They are in Russia too. But we can do better than that. We're going to treat improvement of prison conditions and access to medical care in prisons as a top priority. We're going to end the heat and freezing deaths, for example. It's an embarrassment. Prison conditions like that, prison volume like this, is something that was considered a black mark for a country during the cold war. We're not going to be a country that complains that Navalny died and then leaves all our millions of prisoners in the same or worse conditions.