DOJ sets 3 executions, but Biden against future ones

After 17-year hiatus, 8 federal prisoners have been executed.

WASHINGTON — President-elect 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 17-year 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 has killed more than 250,000 people and is raging inside the nation’s prison systems. This year, the Justice Department has put to death more people than during the previous half-century, despite waning public support from both Democrats and Republicans for its use.

In a court filing Friday night, the department said it was scheduling 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 Thursday, a federal judge ruled that execution could not proceed before year’s end.

Prosecutors say Bourgeois tortured, sexually molested and then beat to death his 2½-year-old daughter.

Johnson was one of three crack cocaine dealers convicted in a string of murders. Prosecutors said he killed seven people in an attempt to expand the territory of a Richmond, Virginia, gang and silence informants. His co-defendants, members of same drug gang, are also on death row.

Johnson’s lawyers argue their client is intellectually disabled, and thus it would be unconstitutional to put him to death. The Supreme Court has held it is unlawful to execute people of such a low intelligence that they can’t function in society.

His lawyers say “no jury or court has ever listened to the evidence at a hearing to decide if he has intellectual disability.”

Higgs was convicted of ordering the 1996 murders of three women at a federal wildlife center near Beltsville, Maryland. Prosecutors say Higgs and two others abducted the women after Higgs became enraged because one of the women rebuffed his advances at party.

Joe Biden