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DOJ schedules 3 executions next week at Indiana prison
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is plowing ahead with its plan to resume federal executions next week for the first time in more than 15 years, despite the coronavirus pandemic raging both inside and outside prisons and stagnating national support for the death penalty.
Three people are scheduled to die by lethal injection in one week at an Indiana prison, beginning Monday. Bureau of Prisons officials insist they will be able to conduct the executions safely and have been holding practice drills for months.
Family members of the victims and the inmates will be able to attend but will be required to wear face masks. Prison officials will take temperature checks. The agency will also make personal protective equipment, including masks, gloves, gowns and face shields, available for witnesses, but there are no plans to test anyone attending the executions for COVID-19, officials said.
The decision to go ahead with the executions has been criticized as a dangerous and a political move by an administration that at times seems disinterested in addressing racial disparities in the death penalty and larger criminal justice system.
Critics argue the federal government is instead creating an unnecessary and manufactured urgency around a topic that isn’t high on the list of American concerns right now, when more than 132,000 people in the United States have died of the coronavirus and the unemployment rate is 11%.
“Why would anybody who is concerned about public health and safety want to bring in people from all over the country for three separate execution in the span of five days to a virus hot spot?” asked Robert Dunham of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonpartisan organization that collects information on capital punishment.
“The original execution plan last year appeared to be political. And the current plan eliminates any doubt about that,“he said.
Attorney General William Barr has denied that politics played a role in the decision last year to resume executions, which ended an informal freeze on imposition of federal capital punishment.
Barr has said the government has an obligation to carry out the sentences, including the death penalty, that are imposed by courts, and that the Justice Department owes it to the families of the victims and others in their communities to do so.
“The American people, acting through Congress and Presidents of both political parties, have long instructed that defendants convicted of the most heinous crimes should be subject to a sentence of death,” Barr said in a statement last month.
But before the pandemic, the economy and health care were Americans’ top priorities for the government to work on in 2020, with 59% and 50% naming the two, respectively, in an open-ended question in an Associated Press-NORC poll from December. Some 35% said immigration was one of the most important issues the government should work on in 2020, and about as many referenced politics or partisan gridlock.
The percentage of Americans in favor of the death penalty stood at 60% in the 2018 General Social Survey, a long-running trends survey. That’s about where it was in the 1970s.
The majority of people on death row are Black and Hispanic, and the number of cases authorized by the attorney general seeking death since the late 1980s are mostly nonwhite people.
The three men chosen to die next week are white:
■ Dustin Lee Honken, who killed five people in Iowa, including two children.
■ Danny Lee, who was convicted in Arkansas of killing a family of three, including an 8-year-old. Family members of Lee’s victims have asked a federal judge to delay his execution, saying the coronavirus puts them at risk if they travel to attend the execution. They have asked that the execution be put off until a treatment or a vaccine is available for the virus.
■ Wesley Ira Purkey, of Kansas, who raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl and killed an 80-year-old woman.