By Kimberly Atkins
Boston Herald
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s halt on federal executions — a move spurred by concerns over botched lethal injections — could swiftly end in the incoming Trump administration, leading to the first federal executions in more than a decade.
The current effective moratorium affects the 62 inmates now on federal death row, including convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Gary Lee Sampson, the confessed serial killer from Abington whose sentencing retrial is underway in Boston after his initial death sentence was thrown out due to jury misconduct.
President Obama has said in recent years he finds the death penalty “deeply troubling” in practice due to issues including racial disparities and wrongful convictions. But Trump and his choice for U.S. attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), both support capital punishment. On the campaign trail, Trump also expressed a willingness to expand its use, saying he’d sign an executive order mandating the death penalty for anyone convicted of killing a police officer.
Trump’s transition team did not answer queries seeking details of the president-elect’s planned federal execution policy.
Death penalty advocates, however, are cheering next month’s administration change.
“I think the federal government can and should start carrying out its death penalties,” said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Sacramento, Calif.-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.
The halt on federal executions and ongoing Justice Department review of lethal injection protocols came after a number of botched state executions in which some lethal drug combinations failed to anesthetize inmates, causing inmates to scream and writhe in pain for a prolonged period.
“The Justice Department is continuing its review of the federal protocol used by the Bureau of Prisons as well as policy issues related to the death penalty, and we have, in effect, a moratorium in place on federal executions in the meantime,” Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr told the Herald.
Beyond his executive orders and Justice Department policy, Trump’s appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court could prevent the justices from reconsidering the constitutionality of the death penalty -- despite comments by Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg openly suggesting that it violates the Eighth Amendment.
“The hope of adding a justice to the Supreme Court who might have serious doubts about the constitutionality of capital punishment have been radically diminished,” said Austin D. Sarat, a professor and capital punishment scholar at Amherst College.
In 2016, there were 30 state executions, the lowest numbers in more than four decades, and polls have shown fewer than half of Americans support the death penalty, according to the Pew Research Center.
However, Election Day signaled a marked shift in the national trend away from capital punishment. California voters rejected a measure to abolish capital punishment in that state and passed a measure to speed up some executions. Nebraska voters reinstated that state’s death penalty.