After almost two decades of no executions, Attorney General William Barr announced Thursday that the federal government will resume executions of inmates on death row, a move that comes at a time when public support for capital punishment is wearing down.
The execution will continue from December when five men convicted of killing children will receive the capital punishment. Additional executions will be scheduled after the last one is carried out in the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute in January.
No executions have been performed since 2003, but prosecutors continue to seek the death penalty for some convicts, including Dylann S. Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine African-American churchgoers in 2015, and the Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, both of whom were sentenced to death.
In the past three decades since the death penalty was reinstated, only three inmates have been executed, two of whom were in 2001 and 2003, The New York Times reports.
“Under administrations of both parties, the Department of Justice has sought the death penalty against the worst criminals,” Barr said in a statement announcing the continuation of executions. “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.”
He did not provide an explanation as to why the administration decided to reinstate the death penalty, saying only that he had issued a protocol to replace the drug cocktail previously used with the pentobarbital drug, due to some botched executions which have resulted in lawsuits.
President Donald Trump has been a staunch supporter of the death penalty advocating for drug dealers to be executed. However, the Times writes, by applying it to inmates convicted of murdering children, he could make a more politically powerful argument for it at a time when public support is waning.
The decision was quickly condemned by Democrats, including several presidential hopefuls, who said it was “immoral and deeply flawed” as well as “blatantly prejudiced and unevenly applied.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden argued that the capital punishment needs to be eliminated because some convicts are at times exonerated. “Because we can’t ensure that we get these cases right every time, we must eliminate the death penalty,” Biden stressed.
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