Biden to work to end executions as 3 more are planned

WASHINGTON — Presidentelect Joe Biden is against the death penalty and will work to end its use, his spokesman said Saturday, as the Justice Department scheduled three more federal executions before the Jan. 20 inauguration, including two shortly before he is set to take office.

The Bureau of Prisons on Thursday carried out the eighth federal execution this year, after a 17year hiatus, and it is likely to increase pressure on Biden decide whether his administration would continue to schedule executions once he is sworn in. Advocacy groups have called on the Trump administration to pause all executions until Biden takes office.

Biden “opposes the death penalty now and in the future,” press secretary TJ Ducklo said. He did not say whether executions would be paused immediately once Biden takes office.

Federal executions resumed this year despite the coronavirus pandemic that is raging inside the nation’s prison systems. This year, the Justice Department has put to death more people than during the previous halfcentury.

In a court filing Friday night, the department said it was scheduling the executions of Alfred Bourgeois for Dec. 11 and Cory Johnson and Dustin Higgs for Jan. 14 and 15. Two other executions had been scheduled for this year, including the first woman set to be executed by the federal government in about six decades. But on Thursday, a federal judge ruled that execution could not proceed before the end of the year.

Prosecutors say Bourgeois tortured, sexually molested, and then beat to death his 2 ½ yearold daughter to death.

Johnson was one of three crack cocaine dealers convicted in a string of murders. Prosecutors said he killed seven people in in an attempt to expand the territory of a Richmond, Va., gang and silence informants.

Higgs was convicted of ordering the 1996 murders of three women near Beltsville, Md. Prosecutors say Higgs and two others abducted the women after Higgs became enraged because one of the women rebuffed his advances.

A September report by the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington said Black people remain overrepresented on death rows, including federal death row. The organization’s database shows 25 of 55 federal death row inmates

( 46%) are Black, while Blacks make up only about 13% of the U. S. population.

Michael Balsamo is an Associated Press writer.