The US government would resume its use of capital punishment after a 16-year hiatus and has set execution dates for five convicted murderers, US Attorney General Bill Barr announced on Thursday.
Acting on US President Donald Trump’s call for tougher penalties on violent crimes, Barr directed the US Federal Bureau of Prisons to adopt a new lethal injection protocol to clear the way to carry out death sentences.
“The Justice Department upholds the rule of law — and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” Barr said in a statement.
Photo: Reuters
There were 25 executions in the US last year, all carried out by state authorities on people convicted on state charges.
However, debate about the methods of execution and controversy over the drugs used, as well as reticence from former US president Barack Obama, means that no federal prisoner has been put to death since 2003.
Barr ordered the bureau to carry out executions using a single lethal injection of the barbiturate pentobarbital, replacing the previous three-drug cocktails using thiopental.
“Since 2010, 14 states have used pentobarbital in over 200 executions, and federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have repeatedly upheld the use of pentobarbital in executions as consistent with the Eighth Amendment” of the US constitution, which bars cruel and unusual punishment, the US Department of Justice said.
There are 62 federal death row prisoners in the US, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, including Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people.
The list also includes Dylann Roof, who murdered nine African-Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015.
On Barr’s order, the bureau has scheduled executions for five people, all convicted 15 years ago or longer in brutal murders that involved children.
They include Daniel Lewis Lee, who in 1996 robbed and killed a family of three, including an eight-year-old girl, and Alfred Bourgeois, who tortured and sexually molested his two-year-old daughter before killing her in 2002.
Federal executions were on hold for nearly four decades until 2001, when Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed.
Two more people were put to death in federal prisons over the subsequent two years, and then were halted again.
Death penalty opponents blasted the policy change and called for a court-ordered delay in the executions, the first of which is scheduled for early December.
“The federal death penalty is arbitrary, racially biased, and rife with poor lawyering and junk science,” Federal Capital Habeas Project director Ruth Friedman said.
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