WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge has temporarily halted the first federal executions in 16 years as a
lawsuit on how the government intends to carry them out continues.
U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutka said in a Wednesday evening ruling that the public is not served by
"short-circuiting" legitimate judicial process.
"It is greatly served by attempting to ensure that the most serious punishment is imposed
lawfully," she wrote.
Attorney General William Barr unexpectedly announced in July that the government would resume executions
on Dec. 9, ending an informal moratorium on federal capital punishment as the issue receded from the
public domain. The Justice Department didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment on Thursday, and
the attorney general was traveling.
The judge’s ruling temporarily postpones four of the five scheduled executions beginning next month; the
fifth had already been halted.
Most Democrats oppose the death penalty. By contrast, President 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.
Still, 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, most recently in 2003, when Louis Jones
was executed for the 1995 kidnapping, rape and murder of a young female soldier.
In 2014, following a botched state execution in Oklahoma, President Barack Obama directed the Justice
Department to conduct a broad review of capital punishment and issues surrounding lethal injection
drugs.
Barr said in July that the Obama-era review had been completed, clearing the way for executions to
resume.
He approved a new procedure for lethal injections that replaces the three-drug combination previously
used in federal executions with one drug, pentobarbital. This is similar to the procedure used in
several states, including Georgia, Missouri and Texas.
Some of the chosen convicts challenged the new procedures in court, arguing that the government was
circumventing proper methods to wrongly execute inmates quickly.
"This decision prevents the government from evading accountability and making an end-run around the
courts by attempting to execute prisoners under a protocol that has never been authorized by
Congress," said the convicts’ attorney, Shawn Nolan. "The court has made clear that no
execution should go forward while there are still so many unanswered questions about the government’s
newly announced execution method."
Danny Lee, of Yukon, Oklahoma, was the first person scheduled to be executed. Lee was convicted in the
1996 deaths of an Arkansas family as part of a plot to set up a whites-only nation in the Pacific
Northwest.
The death penalty remains legal in 30 states, but only a handful regularly conduct executions. Texas has
executed 108 prisoners since 2010, far more than any other state.
Though there hasn’t been a federal execution since 2003, the Justice Department has continued to approve
death penalty prosecutions, and federal courts have sentenced defendants to death.
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This story has been corrected to show the ruling was late Wednesday, not Thursday.