The announcement reversed what had been essentially a moratorium on the federal death penalty since 2003. Five men convicted of murdering children will be executed in December and January at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, Barr said, and additional executions will be scheduled later.
Prosecutors still seek the death penalty in some federal cases, including for Dylann S. Roof, the avowed white supremacist who gunned down nine African American churchgoers in 2015, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber. Both were convicted and sentenced to death.
But the federal government has only executed three inmates since it reinstated the death penalty in 1988, including Timothy J. McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, in 2001, and Louis Jones Jr., who was executed in 2003 for the rape and murder of a female soldier.
“Under administrations of both parties, the Department of Justice has sought the death penalty against the worst criminals,” 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.”
Barr also said that he had issued a protocol replacing the three-drug procedure previously used in federal executions with a single drug, pentobarbital, that is widely available. The drug cocktail had fallen out of favor because of botched executions that prompted a slew of lawsuits.
Barr did not say why the Trump administration was reinstating executions now, but the Justice Department also filed notice Thursday in a long-running case challenging the use of the three-drug combination, saying that it was moving to the new protocol. The department finalized the logistics to schedule the executions and change the lethal injections procedure several weeks ago, according to a department official.
Democrats, including presidential hopefuls, immediately criticized Barr’s directive. Sen. Kamala Harris of California called capital punishment “immoral and deeply flawed.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts restated her opposition to the death penalty, and Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio called it “blatantly prejudiced and unevenly applied.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.