US bringing back death penalty

After a gunman killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue last year, US President Donald Trump told reporters that the perpetrator "should really suffer the ultimate price. I think they should very much bring the death penalty into vogue."

Now the federal government is reinstating the death penalty after it was dormant for 16 years following authorization from Congress and signing by Trump.

US Attorney General Bill Barr made the announcement on Thursday: "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."

He didn't say why executions were resuming, but Trump has been a vocal supporter of the death penalty.

For 16 years, a combination of successful appeals, limited access to lethal-injection drugs and an effective moratorium during the Obama administration prevented new executions by the federal government. During that time, states carried out executions, as they do now.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) said the decision was made related to "five death-row inmates convicted of murdering, and in some cases torturing and raping, the most vulnerable in our society — children and the elderly".

DOJ said the executions of five men have been scheduled for December and early 2020, by lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

All five to be executed have exhausted appeals and have no legal obstacles to prevent their deaths.

Barr also directed the government to change the mixture of three drugs used for federal executions to just a single drug — phenobarbital — a barbiturate that in high doses causes respiratory arrest.

The use of the drug has been upheld by the Supreme Court and has been used in the executions of 200 inmates in 14 states since 2010.

Barr's announcement comes as the number of executions in the US has declined over the last decade amid concerns about whether capital punishment disproportionately affects black people.

According to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), currently 42 percent of death row inmates are white, 41.5 percent are black, 13.5 percent are Latino, and about 3 percent are listed as other.

US Census Bureau data show that as of July 2018, the US black population was 13.4 percent.

Ruth Friedman, the director of the Federal Capital Habeas Project, called the federal death penalty "arbitrary, racially biased, and rife with poor lawyering and junk science".

Democratic presidential hopefuls denounced Barr's order.

US Senator Kamala Harris, a former California prosecutor, tweeted that "capital punishment is immoral and deeply flawed''.

US Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey said "the death penalty is not only ineffective and immoral, but also fraught with biases against people of color, low-income individuals and those with mental illness. It is a waste of taxpayer dollars and does nothing to improve public safety.''

US Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts tweeted: "Our criminal justice system has a long history of mistakes when it comes to capital punishment — especially when it comes to Black and Brown people. We cannot let a broken system decide the fate of incarcerated Americans. I oppose the death penalty."

Bernie Sanders, US senator from Vermont, also spoke out against the decision, tweeting: "There's enough violence in the world. The government shouldn't add to it."

Public support for the death penalty, which reached a four-decade low in 2016, has increased somewhat. Today, 54 percent of Americans favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, while 39 percent are opposed, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in April and May 2018.

Two years ago, 49 percent favored the death penalty for those convicted of murder, the lowest level of support for capital punishment in surveys dating to the early 1970s.

In 1972, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, halted all executions in the US, ruling that state death-penalty statutes were too arbitrary, but then reinstated it in 1976. The justices further narrowed the situations where capital punishment could be used in 1977.

The government has put to death 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.

There are at least 60 federal prisoners on death row, including Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who gunned down nine black parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina church in 2015, according to the Justice Department and the DPIC.