U.S. set to resume executions
WASHINGTON — The federal government will resume executions of death-row inmates after a nearly two-decade hiatus, Attorney General William Barr said Thursday, countering a broad national shift away from the death penalty as public support for it has dwindled.
The announcement reverses what had been essentially a moratorium on the federal death penalty. Five men convicted of murdering children will be executed in December or January at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., Barr said, and additional executions will be scheduled later.
Prosecutors still seek the death penalty in some federal cases, including for Dylann Roof, an avowed white supremacist who gunned down nine African American churchgoers in 2015, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber. But the federal government has executed only three inmates since it reinstated the death penalty in 1988, including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who was put to death in 2001, and Louis Jones Jr., who was executed in 2003 for the rape and murder of a female soldier.
“Under administrations of both parties, the Department of Justice has sought the death penalty against the worst criminals,” Barr said in a statement. “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.”
The number of executions in the United States had fallen to less than two dozen a year since a high in 1999, when 98 executions were carried out at the state level, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. There are 61 inmates on federal death row, 12 of them in Texas.
Public support for the death penalty hit a two-decade low three years ago, when just under half of Americans polled backed it for people convicted of murder, down from nearly 80 percent in 1996, according to the Pew Research Center. Support for capital punishment ticked back up to 54 percent last year, the center found.
Capital punishment fell out of favor as researchers began to question whether it deterred people from committing heinous crimes and as more defense lawyers proved that their clients were wrongfully convicted.
Civil rights advocates also noted that there was a great racial disparity among inmates on death row and argued that the penalty was disproportionately applied to black men.
All told, 21 states have outlawed the death penalty.
On Thursday, Barr said that he had issued a protocol that replaces the three-drug procedure previously used in federal executions with a single drug, pentobarbital, which is widely available.
The first to face the death chamber in Texas could be Alfred Bourgeois of Corpus Christi, who was convicted of torturing, sexually abusing and killing his 2-year-old daughter while he had her in custody. He is set to die by lethal injection on Jan. 13, according to the U.S. Justice Department.
Bourgeois’s daughter was slain on federal property at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station on June 28, 2002. A federal jury in Corpus Christi convicted him in 2004.