A federal halt to the death penalty has been handed down by Attorney General Merrick Garland. The Bureau of Prisons was ordered to stop executions by lethal injection while the method undergoes further review.
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William Barr recently resumed the death penalty in 2019 under the Trump administration, after a roughly twenty-year pause in federal executions. Barr cited the need to continue carrying out sentences the justice system had prescribed to the most serious offenders of the most heinous crimes.
Garland, however, stated in a directive to senior officials, that new considerations have been introduced into the debate surrounding the death penalty, such as “the troubling number of exonerations” referring to cases where the conviction for a crime is reversed.
“The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States but is also treated fairly and humanely,” said Merrick.
Merrick also noted the Department of Justice would be re-examining a Trump-era rule that permitted federal prisons to conduct executions in the manner directed by the state.
Garland’s decision comes after the Supreme Court granted review to an appeal filed by the Justice Department over a First Circuit Court ruling vacating the death penalty imposed on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the convicted Boston Marathon bomber.
The attorney general’s Thursday memo did not specify whether the federal government would continue to pursue the death sentence in criminal cases, therefore leaving unchanged the state of the DOJ’s petition to preserve the capital punishment assigned to Tsarnaev.
However, some legal scholars have questioned whether Garland would drop the appeal. While the Supreme Court has agreed to consider the case, it has not released a timeline for when it will add it to the docket.
