30 June 2020 :
U.S. Supreme Court Declines to Hear Execution Protocol Case, Removing Barrier to Resumption of Federal Executions. The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a challenge to the federal execution protocol, removing a potential major obstacle to the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) plan to resume federal executions after a 17-year hiatus. The decision leaves in place an April 2020 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that lifted an injunction that had halted federal executions. The Department has scheduled four executions in July and August. The Court offered no explanation for its denial, though Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted they would have granted the prisoners’ petition for a writ of certiorari. The prisoners are challenging the circuit court’s splintered 2-1 ruling, which their petition said “flouted precedent and upended key principles of administrative law rooted in the separation of powers.” The decision “raises more questions than it resolves about how to conduct federal executions,” the prisoners argued. The challenge centered on whether DOJ complied with federal administrative law in issuing its execution protocol and whether the Department’s promulgation of a single federal protocol satisfies the statutory requirements of the Federal Death Penalty Act, which mandates that the federal government carry out its executions in the manner employed by the state in which the federal prisoner was sentenced to death. While the prisoners’ petition for review was still pending before the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice set four execution dates. Three prisoners – Daniel Lee, Wesley Purkey, and Dustin Honken, whom DOJ unsuccessfully attempted to execute in December 2019 and January 2020 —are scheduled for execution over a five-day period beginning July 13. A fourth prisoner – Keith Nelson – is scheduled for execution on August 28. The federal government has carried out only three executions since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988, most recently in 2003.
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/u-s-supreme-court-declines-to-hear-execution-protocol-case-removing-barrier-to-resumption-of-federal-executions
