DoJ sets new dates to begin death-row executions following legal battle

The justice department has set new dates to begin executing federal death-row inmates following a long legal battle over the plan to resume the executions for the first time since 2003.

William Barr, the attorney general, directed the federal Bureau of Prisons to schedule the executions, beginning in mid-July, of four inmates convicted of killing children.

The move is likely to add a new front to the national conversation about criminal justice reform and raise interest in an issue that has largely lain dormant in recent years amid the culture battles that Donald Trump already is waging on matters such as abortion and immigration in the lead-up to the 2020 elections.

Three of the men had been scheduled to be put to death when Barr announced the federal government would resume executions last year, ending an informal moratorium on federal capital punishment as the issue receded from the public domain.

The justice department had scheduled five executions set to begin in December, but some of the inmates challenged the new procedures in court, arguing that the government was circumventing proper methods in order to wrongly execute inmates quickly.

The department wouldn’t say why the executions of two of the inmates scheduled in December hadn’t been rescheduled.

The federal government’s initial effort was put on hold by a trial judge, and the federal appeals court in Washington and the supreme court both declined to step in late last year. But in April, the appeals court threw out the judge’s order. Lawyers for the inmates are asking the supreme court to order a halt to the process.

“The American people, acting through Congress and presidents of both political parties, have long instructed that defendants convicted of the most heinous crimes should be subject to a sentence of death,” Barr said in a statement.

The inmates who will be executed are: Danny Lee, who was convicted in Arkansas of killing a family of three, including an eight-year-old; Wesley Ira Purkey, of Kansas, who raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl and killed an 80-year-old woman; Dustin Lee Honken, who killed five people in Iowa, including two children; and Keith Dwayne Nelson, who kidnapped a 10-year-old girl who was rollerblading in front of her Kansas home and raped her in a forest behind a church before strangling the young girl with a wire.

Three of the executions – for Lee, Purkley and Honken – are scheduled days apart beginning 13 July. Nelson’s execution is scheduled for 28 August. The DoJ said additional executions will be set at a later date.

Executions on the federal level have been rare and the government has put to death only three defendants since restoring the federal death penalty in 1988 – most recently in 2003, when Louis Jones was executed for the 1995 kidnapping, rape and murder of a young female soldier. Though there hasn’t been a federal execution since 2003, the DoJ has continued to approve death penalty prosecutions and federal courts have sentenced defendants to death.

In 2014, following a botched state execution in Oklahoma, Barack Obama directed the DoJ to conduct a broad review of capital punishment and issues surrounding lethal injection drugs.

Donald Trump has spoken often about capital punishment and his belief that executions serve as an effective deterrent and an appropriate punishment for some crimes, including mass shootings and the killings of police officers.

Lawyers for the men decried the Justice Department’s decision to move ahead with the executions.