*The Donald Trump administration will see three more federal executions take place before Trump leaves office, after two recent executions which many found to be a shocking precedent for a lame-duck president. Reporter Wesley Lowery joins Tiffany Cross to discuss. Watch via the player above.
Here’s more info on federal executions via Time:
The U.S. Department of Justice executed 40-year-old Brandon Bernard Thursday evening, despite vocal pushback from numerous advocates and high-profile figures. Fifty-six-year-old Alfred Bourgeois was executed Friday, bringing the total number of people executed by the federal government since July up to 10—the highest in a single year since 1896.
A third defendant, Lisa Montgomery, had been scheduled to be executed on Dec. 8, but a judge stayed her execution until Dec. 31 after both her attorneys contracted COVID-19.
MORE ON EURWEB: Maya Angelou Once Explained Why She Married the Same White Man THREE Times!
After a 17-year hiatus, the Trump Administration resumed federal executions in July and has since executed nine individuals, including Bernard on Dec. 10 and Orlando Cordia Hall on Nov. 19—the first people executed under a lame-duck president in over 100 years. In an unprecedented move, the Administration is now speeding up its pace of executions further still, scheduling five more (including Bernard and Bourgeois) in December and January before President-Elect Joe Biden—who has pledged to end the use of federal death penalty—takes office.
In all of the 2000s, the federal government executed three people, for comparison.
“This string of executions is absolutely exceptional,” says Ngozi Ndulue, senior director of Research and Special Projects at the Death Penalty Information Center. “Exceptional in the number, exceptional in the break from precedent, exceptional in conducting them in the middle of a pandemic.”
Get the rest of this report on federal executions at Time.
