The US Justice Department has reinstated a two-decades long dormant policy allowing the federal government's use of capital punishment and immediately scheduled the executions for five death row federal inmates.
The death chamber at the Georgia Diagnostic Prison in Jackson, Georgia. Photo: AFP
"Congress has expressly authorised the death penalty through legislation adopted by the people's representatives in both houses of Congress and signed by the president," Attorney General William 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 last federal execution took place in 2003. Since then, protracted litigation over the drugs historically used in lethal injection executions prevented the government from continuing the practice, according to Justice Department officials.
US Attorney General William Barr. Photo: AFP
President Donald Trump has called for increasing the use of the death penalty for drug traffickers and mass shooters, a request the department has since laid the groundwork to carry out.
Early on in his administration, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons to examine what steps might be required to resume the use of the death penalty, a Justice Department official said.
In March 2018, Sessions also called on federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty when bringing cases against drug dealers and traffickers as part of a strategy to help combat the opioid crisis.
In May, the department's Office of Legal Counsel took steps to make it easier for states to carry out executions by declaring that the Food and Drug Administration lacked the power to regulate lethal injection drugs.
The Senate Judiciary Committee's Ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein said Thursday's announcement was wrong.
"The federal government should be leading the effort to end this brutal and often cruel punishment, not advocating for its return. It's time we evolve and put this terrible practice behind us," she said.
US public support for the death penalty had declined since the 1990s, according to opinion polls, and all European Union nations had abolished it.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres believes the practice should not happen anywhere, spokesperson Farhan Haq said.
"All the countries that continue to impose the death penalty on the population are flying in the face of what the UN believes is the principled position to end this sort of penalty once and for all," Mr Haq told reporters.
There are also deep divisions on the US Supreme Court over the death penalty and how it is implemented.
Some liberal justices have said that capital punishment as currently employed in the United States may run afoul of the Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. They have also raised questions over lethal injection.
But the conservative-majority court, with two justices appointed by Mr Trump, has given little indication of being willing to rule the death penalty unconstitutional.
Five executions
There are 62 federal inmates on death row, including Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who planted a deadly bomb at the Boston Marathon in 2013.
The Justice Department said it has scheduled executions for five federal inmates who had been convicted of horrific murders and sex crimes, with more planned in the future.
All five will be executed by lethal injection using a single drug - pentobarbital.
Since 2010, 14 states have switched to using pentobarbital to carry out more than 200 executions, after they were unable to obtain the chemicals needed to execute people using a drug cocktail.
Those inmates include Daniel Lewis Lee, a white supremacist who was convicted in Arkansas for murdering a family of three, including an eight-year-old girl.
Another is Lezmond Mitchell, who was found guilty by a jury in Arizona of stabbing a 63-year-old grandmother and forcing her young granddaughter to sit next to her lifeless body on a car journey before slitting the girl's throat.
The other three inmates who will be executed are Wesley Ira Purkey, who raped and murdered a teenaged girl, Alfred Bourgeois, who sexually molested and killed his young daughter, and Dustin Lee Honken, who shot and killed five people.
Lee will be the first one to be executed, with the date set for 9 December, 2019.
"Each of these inmates has exhausted their appellate and post-conviction remedies," the department said.
- Reuters