National Public Radio
The U.S. government is poised to carry out the death penalty for the first time in nearly two decades, the Justice Department announced Thursday.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr has instructed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to change the federal execution protocol to include capital punishment, the Justice Department said.
Barr also asked the prisons bureau to schedule the executions of five inmates who have been found guilty of murder. According to the DOJ, the victims in each case included children and the elderly. In some of the cases, the convicted murderers also tortured and raped their victims.
“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,” Barr said in a statement.
The U.S. government’s use of capital punishment has long been scrutinized on the grounds of racial fairness. In 1972, the Supreme Court’s Furman v. Georgia ruling largely put an end to federal executions, after the court found that blacks were far more likely to be executed than whites.
Read more at https://www.npr.org/2019/07/25/745223284/federal-government-to-resume-capital-punishment-after-nearly-20-year-hiatus.
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