WASHINGTON--The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday 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.
"Congress has expressly authorized 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.
U.S. 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 in the Trump 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. Most recently 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 in a statement.
U.S. public support for the death penalty has declined since the 1990s, according to opinion polls, and all European Union nations have abolished it. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres believes the practice should not happen anywhere, spokesman Farhan Haq said.
"All the countries that continue to impose the death penalty on the population are flying in the face of what the U.N. believes is the principled position to end this sort of penalty once and for all," Haq told reporters.
There are also deep divisions on the U.S. 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.
