Justice Department To Resume Federal Executions In December
WASHINGTON (CBS SF/AP/CNN) — The Justice Department said Thursday that it will carry out executions of federal death row inmates for the first time since 2003.
Five inmates who have been sentenced to death are scheduled to be executed starting in December, according to Attorney General William Barr.
In 2014, following a botched state execution in Oklahoma, then-President Barack Obama directed the department to conduct a broad review of capital punishment and issues surrounding lethal injection drugs. It remains unclear today what came of that review and whether it will change the way the federal government carries out executions.
That review has been completed and the executions can continue, the department said.
There are currently only two California men on federal death row. Jurijus Kadamovas and Iouri Mikhel were sentenced to death for the 2001 killings and kidnappings-for-ransom of five Russian and Georgian immigrants whose bodies were dumped in a reservoir near Yosemite National Park.
Texas leads the national with inmates on federal death row with 13, Missouri follows with 8 and Virginia 7.
The five federal inmates ordered to be executed are Daniel Lewis Lee for murdering a family of three, including an 8-year-old girl; Lezmond Mitchell for murdering a 63-year-old and her 9-year-old granddaughter; Wesley Ira Purkey for raping and murdering a 16-year-old girl; Alfred Bourgeois for torturing and killing his own 2-year-old daughter; Dustin Lee Honken, for shooting and killing five people, including two young girls.
Barr described the five as "five death-row inmates convicted of murdering, and in some cases torturing and raping, the most vulnerable in our society — children and the elderly."
U.S. Senator Kamala Harris was outspoken in her opposition to restarting the executions.
"Today is a sad day for the United States," she said in a news release. "The administration's decision to resume the death penalty is both misguided and immoral. As a career law enforcement official, I have long opposed the death penalty because it is discriminatory, irreversible, ineffective, and a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars."
"Our justice system is supposed to treat all equally, Harris continued. "But the death penalty has been proven to be unequally applied. Black and Latino defendants are far more likely to be executed than their white counterparts."
Executions on the federal level have been rare. The government has put to death only three defendants since restoring the federal death penalty in 1988, the most recent of which occurred in 2003, when Louis Jones was executed for the 1995 kidnapping, rape and murder of a young female soldier.
"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," Barr said in a news release. "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."
Capital punishment has emerged as a flashpoint in the Democratic presidential primary, with former Vice President Joe Biden this week shifting to call for the elimination of the federal death penalty after years of supporting it. Biden's criminal justice plan also would encourage states to follow the federal government in ending the death penalty, 25 years after he helped pass a tough crime bill that expanded capital punishment for more potential offenses.
The lone Democratic White House hopeful who has publicly supported preserving capital punishment in certain circumstances is Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, who has said he would leave it open as an option for major crimes such as terrorism.
At the state level, the clock stopped ticking for more than 730 inmates housed on San Quentin's Death Row including Scott Peterson, Richard Allen Davis, Charles Ng and Cary Stayner after Gov. Gavin Newsom officially signed a moratorium on executions in March.
There are currently 737 inmates on California's largest-in-the-nation death row. Of those, more than six in 10 condemned California inmates are minorities, which his Newsom's office cited as proof of racial disparities in who is sentenced to die. Since 1973, five California inmates who were sentenced to death were later exonerated.
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Eighty condemned California inmates have died of natural causes since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1978. Another 26 committed suicide. California has executed 13 inmates, while two were executed in other states.
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