Pace of US executions speeds up in virus era

CHICAGO — As Donald Trump’s presidency winds down, his administration is ratcheting up the pace of federal executions despite a surge of coronavirus cases in prisons, announcing plans for five starting Thursday and concluding just days before the Jan. 20 inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.

If the five go off as planned, it will make 13 executions since July when the Republican administration resumed putting inmates to death after a 17-year hiatus and will cement Trump’s legacy as the most prolific execution president in over 130 years. He’ll leave office having executed about a quarter of all federal death-row prisoners, despite waning support for capital punishment among both Democrats and Republicans.

At t o r n e y General William Barr defended the extension of executions into the post-election period, saying he’ll likely schedule more before he departs the Justice Department. A Biden administration, he said, should keep it up.

“I think the way to stop the death penalty is to repeal the death penalty,” Barr said. “But if you ask juries to impose and juries impose it, then it should be carried out.”

The plan breaks a tradition of lame-duck presidents deferring to incoming presidents on policy about which they differ so starkly, said Robert Durham, director of the non-partisan Death Penalty Information Center. Biden, a Democrat, is a death penalty foe, and his spokesman said he would work to end the death penalty when he is in office.

“It’s hard to understand why anybody at this stage of a presidency feels compelled to kill this many people, especially when the American public voted for someone else to replace you and that person has said he opposes the death penalty,” Durham said. “This is a complete historical aberration.”

Not since the waning days of Grover Cleveland’s presidency in the late 1800s has the federal government executed inmates during a presidential transition, Durham said. Cleveland’s was also the last presidency during which the number of civilians executed federally was in the double digits in a year, with 14 executed in 1896.

Anti- death penalty groups want Biden to lobby harder for a halt to the flurry of pre-inaugural executions, though Biden can’t do much to stop them, especially considering Trump won’t concede he lost the election and is spreading baseless claims of voting fraud.

One, the Ohio-based Death Penalty Action, has garnered thousands of signatures on a petition calling on Biden to make “a clear and strong statement” demanding the executions stop.

The issue is an uncomfortable one for Biden given his past support for capital punishment and his central role crafting a 1994 crime bill that added 60 federal crimes for which someone could be put to death.

Activists say the bill, which Biden has since agreed was flawed, puts added pressure on him to act.

“He is acknowledging the sins” of the past, said Abraham Bonowitz, Death Penalty Action’s director. “Now he’s got to fix it.”

Several inmates already executed on death row were convicted under provisions of that bill, including ones that made kidnappings and carjackings resulting in death federal capital offenses.

The race of those set to die buttresses criticism that the bill disproportionately affected Black people. Four of the five set to die over the next few weeks are Black. The fifth, Lisa Montgomery, is white. Convicted of killing a pregnant woman and cutting out the baby alive, she is the only female of the 61 inmates who were on death row when executions resumed, and she would be the first woman to be executed federally in nearly six decades.

The executions this year have been by lethal injection at a U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, where all federal executions take place. The drug used to carry out the sentences is sparse. The Justice Department recently updated protocols to allow for executions by firing squad and poison gas, though it’s unclear if those methods might be used in coming weeks.

Barr announced in July 2019 that executions would resume, though there had been no public clamor for it. Several lawsuits kept the initial batch from being carried out, and by the time the Bureau of Prisons got clearance the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing. The virus has killed more than 288,000 people in the United States, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

Critics have said the restart of executions in an election year was politically motivated, helping Trump burnish his claim that he is a law-and-order president.