[ad_1]
The Trump administration paid private executioners in cash and bought drugs from a secret pharmacy as part of a rush to execute most federal prisoners since World War II, court documents obtained by ProPublica reveal.
The Justice Department, under Attorney General Bill Barr, has killed 10 federal inmates since July and plans to go ahead with three more before Joe Biden’s inauguration next month.
Court records, which have not been previously reported, shed light on how the Trump administration is rushing to use its final days to execute federal prisoners.
Two inmates have been executed this month alone, including one who went ahead despite appeals and objections from people like Kim Kardashian.
It is the first time in more than 130 years that federal executions have been carried out during a futile period.
Among the details included in the court records are that private executioners have been paid in cash, drugs have been purchased from a pharmacy that failed quality tests, and executions have progressed in the middle of the night.
The Trump administration and the Justice Department, under Attorney General Bill Barr, have killed 10 federal inmates since July and plans to go ahead with three more before Joe Biden’s inauguration next month.
It is not clear why private contractors were hired to carry out the executions. An attorney for the Bureau of Prisons was quoted in a statement as saying, “If we didn’t pay them in cash, they probably wouldn’t participate.”
An execution has been carried out while an appeal was still pending.
Authorities also left Daniel Lewis Lee, who was the first federal prisoner to be executed in July, tied to a stretcher as lawyers tried to withdraw a Supreme Court order, court documents show.
He was executed as soon as the government lawyers removed the legal obstacle.
“Today, Lee finally faced the justice he deserved,” Barr said in a statement at the time.
The White House has not commented on ProPublica’s report on the rush to execute the prisoners.
In a statement, the Justice Department said: ‘Seeking the death penalty and executing capital sentences is not a political issue, nor have political considerations influenced the department’s decisions.
“The death penalty is a matter of public safety and law enforcement, and the department is obligated to carry out these sentences regardless of who the president or attorney general is.”
Barr had his last day with the Justice Department on Wednesday.
The Trump administration has now executed more federal prisoners than any other president since Franklin Roosevelt carried out 16 executions in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
The United States government has also carried out more executions in a single year than all states that still carry out executions, according to an annual report on the death penalty released earlier this month.
EXECUTED: (In the photo clockwise) Alfred Bourgeois, Brandon Bernard, Orlando Cordia Hall, Christopher Vialva, William Emmett Lecroy, Jr and William Emmett Lecroy, Jr
The dwindling number of states with active death penalty programs carried out just seven executions in 2020 before some put pauses in their execution schedules to wait for the pandemic to pass.
Trump has overseen a thorough resumption of federal executions this year after a 17-year hiatus, carrying out 10 executions even as support for capital punishment waned.
The Trump administration has three more executions scheduled before he leaves the White House.
One of the people scheduled to be executed is Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row. She was convicted of using a rope to strangle a pregnant woman, 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett, in 2004 and then using a kitchen knife to cut the girl out of the womb, authorities said.
If Montgomery is executed as planned on January 12, she would be the first woman to be executed by the federal government in about six decades.
The last federal execution is scheduled for January 15, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, and just five days before Biden’s inauguration.
EXECUTED: (Pictured clockwise) Lezmond Charles Mitchell, Dustin Lee Honken, Daniel Lewis Lee and Wesley Ira Purkey
The two executions that occurred this month included a Louisiana trucker who severely abused his 2-year-old daughter for weeks in 2002, then killed her by repeatedly banging her head against the windows and dash of a truck.
Alfred Bourgeois, 56, was executed on December 11 in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Bourgeois’s lawyers said that Trump’s apparent rush to carry out the executions before Biden’s inauguration deprived their client of his right to exhaust his legal options.
The Justice Department gave Bourgeois just 21 days notice that he was to be executed under protocols that cut the required notice period from 90 days, one of his attorneys said.
Brandon Bernard was executed a day earlier, on December 10, for his role in the 1999 murder of a religious couple from Iowa after he and other teenage gang members kidnapped and robbed Todd and Stacie Bagley in Texas.
Bernard, who was 18 at the time of the murders, was a rare execution of a person who was in his late teens when his crime was committed.
Reality TV star Kim Kardashian West had asked Trump to commute Bernard’s sentence to life in prison, citing, among other things, remorse that Bernard expressed over years.