The US justice department has announced the resolution of US federal
government start executing death-row inmates after a sixteen-year
break.
The Attorney General, William Barr said in a statement that he had
directed the Bureau of Prisons, BOP, to schedule the executions of
five inmates convicted of murders or rapes of children or the elderly.
The executions have been scheduled for December 2019 and January 2020.
The announcement lifts what was an informal moratorium on the federal
death penalty since the 2003 execution of Louis Jones Junior, a
fifty-three-year-old a Gulf War veteran, for the kidnap and murder of
a nineteen-year-old soldier Tracie Joy McBride.
The death penalty was outlawed at state and federal level by a 1972
Supreme Court decision but reinstated in 1988.
There are sixty-two inmates currently on federal death row.
Mr. Barr said he had instructed the BOP to adopt an addendum that
allows it to use the single drug Pentobarbital in place of a
three-drug procedure previously used in federal executions.
Comments are closed for this post.