In his final days in office, Trump orders a series of executions

As President Donald Trump’s days in the White House decline, his administration undergoes a series of federal executions.

Five executions are scheduled before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, breaking a 130-year precedent of pausing executions amid a presidential transition.

And if all five take place, Trump will be the nation’s most prolific executing president in more than a century, overseeing the executions of 13 on death row since July this year.

The five executions will begin this week, starting with Brandon Bernard, 40, and Alfred Bourgeois, 56. Both are scheduled to be executed in a Terre Haute, Indiana, penitentiary.

Attorney General William Barr has said that his justice department is simply upholding existing law. But critics have said the move is concerning, coming only weeks before Biden, who has said he will seek to end the death penalty, takes office.

“This is really out of the norm, in a pretty extreme way,” said Ngozi Ndulue, director of research at the nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center.

Here’s what you need to know about President Trump’s rush of last-minute executions.

Since the US Supreme Court reinstated the federal death penalty in 1988, federal executions in the United States have been rare.

Before Trump took office, only three federal executions had taken place in this period.

All were carried out under Republican President George W. Bush, and included inmate Timothy McVeigh, convicted of the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. Since 2003, there have been no federal executions at all.

US states have continued to execute inmates in state prisons, leading to the death of 22 inmates on death row last year. But state executions are also on a downward trend.

A growing number have mobilized to abolish capital punishment entirely, and most have formally banned the practice or have not executed any prisoners in more than a decade.

Popular opinion has also shied away from capital punishment. A Gallup poll from November 2019 found that 60% of Americans supported life in prison over the death penalty for the first time since the poll began more than 30 years ago.

“Public support for the death penalty has been minimal for decades,” Ms. Ndulue said.

More problems have arisen with methods of execution, obtaining drugs used for lethal injections, and the costs of decades-long court battles and appeals.

In July 2019, Barr announced the scheduled executions of five death row inmates, despite prevailing practices and public opinion.

“Congress has expressly authorized the death penalty,” the country’s top legal official said in a statement at the time. “The Justice Department upholds the rule of law, and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry out the sentence imposed by our justice system.”

The selected inmates had been convicted of murdering or raping children and the elderly, Barr said.

The move drew harsh criticism from leading Democrats and human rights groups.

“We feel [the death penalty] it is an unconstitutionally arbitrary punishment that should have been abolished decades ago, “said Lisa Cylar Barrett, policy director for the NCAAP Legal Defense Fund.

And the particular selection of prisoners fueled accusations that the decision was politically motivated.

The first series of executions this summer, during a wave of protests and demonstrations against racism, were all of white men. Now, four of the five prisoners scheduled to be executed are African American.

Ms. Ndulue said she did not believe it was “a coincidence” that the execution of black prisoners was not scheduled during a period of “heightened awareness of racial disparities surrounding the federal death penalty.”

Research suggests that the death penalty has been applied differently based on race.

“One of the strongest findings from study after study, across jurisdictions across the country, is that the victim’s race is an important factor in determining whether or not the death penalty will be applied,” said Ms. Ndulue .

If the executions of Brandon Bernard and Alfred Bourgeois go ahead as scheduled, the 10 prisoners executed in 2020 will bring a total of a year unmatched in modern history.

“We would have to go back to 1896 to find another year where there were 10 or more executions,” said Ms. Ndulue.

The Trump administration has also chosen to carry out federal executions amid a political transition, with a lame president, for the first time in more than a century.

In general, incumbent presidents have deferred to their predecessors, allowing presidents-elect to set the course.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Barr defended post-election executions and said he would likely schedule more before leaving the justice department.

“I think the way to stop the death penalty is to repeal the death penalty,” he said. “But if you ask the jurors to enforce it, then it should be done.”

But it’s a controversial choice, especially as the incoming Biden administration has said it will work to end the death penalty.

Bernard’s first scheduled execution has attracted particular attention. Bernard, convicted of murder and kidnapping in 1999, was 18 years old at the time of the crime and would be the youngest criminal to be executed by the federal government in nearly 70 years.

Five of the nine surviving jurors in the case, as well as the US prosecutor who defended the death penalty on appeal, have publicly called for their execution to be stopped.

Kim Kardashian chimed in as well, making a direct appeal to Trump on Twitter.

Trump has been a staunch defender of the death penalty for a long time. Biden’s team objects.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, in particular, has been a constant critic of the practice. He came out against capital punishment in his successful 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney and refused to seek the death penalty for the murder of a 29-year-old police officer, killed in the line of duty, despite of the pressure of his party.

The president-elect’s record is more uneven.

Biden’s 1994 crime bill added about 60 federal crimes for which someone could be executed. Some of those currently sentenced to death were sentenced under the provisions of their legislation. Now, he has vowed to push for legislation that eliminates federal executions entirely and to encourage states to do the same.

Biden’s team has observed that more than 160 people on death row in the United States since 1973 have subsequently been exonerated. Biden has yet to name his pick for the United States attorney general.