Federal Scheduled

From the BBC:

“US government orders first executions since 2003”

The US federal government is to resume executing death-row inmates after a 16-year hiatus, the justice department has announced in a statement. Attorney General William Barr directed the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to schedule the executions of five inmates. Mr Barr said the five had been convicted of murders or rapes of children or the elderly.  The executions have been scheduled for December 2019 and January 2020. Mr 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." There are 62 inmates on federal death row, but the last federal execution was in 2003. In a statement released on Thursday, Mr Barr said executions would resume with the deaths of five inmates "convicted of murdering, and in some cases torturing and raping, the most vulnerable in our society - children and the elderly". The death penalty was outlawed at state and federal level by a 1972 Supreme Court decision but reinstated in 1988.  According to data collected by the Death Penalty Information Center, 78 people were sentenced to death between 1988 and 2018 but only three have been since executed. Mr Barr instructed the BOP to adopt an addendum that allows them to use the single drug Pentobarbital in place of a three-drug procedure previously used in federal executions. The drug is a potent sedative that slows down the body, including the nervous system, to the point of death. The Department of Justice said the five scheduled executions were for Daniel Lee Lewis, who killed a family of three including an eight-year-old girl; Lezmond Mitchell, who killed a 63-year-old woman and her nine-year old granddaughter; Wesley Ira Purkey, who raped and killed a 16-year-old girl and murdered an 80-year-old woman; Alfred Bourgeois, who molested and killed his two-year-old daughter; and Dustin Lee Honken, who killed five people including two children. The five executions would take place at the US Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana, and additional executions would take place at a later date, the justice department said.

^ I believe the US (at the Federal and State Levels) should have the Death Penalty and use it for: murder and terrorism. It’s all well and good to claim you don’t want the Death Penalty, but if someone kills a person you know and love then they don’t deserve a life sentence in jail where they can get college degrees, watch movies, sleep with their spouse or partner and better themselves and eventually get out. Once a murderer always a murderer. There is no rehabilitation for a killer or a terrorist. To think otherwise shows a lack of understanding on your part.  ^

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49118134