Conduct Unbecoming: The Resumption of Federal Executions | UPDATES/University of Baltimore School of Law

The federal death chamber, Terre Haute, IN

John Bessler (U of Baltimore) has written a compelling post about the gratuitous cruelty of the push by Attorney General William Barr to resume federal executions.  The cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the Trump administration and the flatulence of the Supreme Court's right wing majority is exemplified in the Curt's denial 5-4, of a stay for the execution of  "Wesley Purkey, a 68-year-old federal inmate who has Alzheimer’s disease and, according to a recent in-person evaluation by a forensic psychiatrist, “lack[s] a rational understanding of the basis for his execution.”  Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent was joined by the three other moderate members of the Supreme Court.
I have one criticism - that he fails to list New Jersey's 2007 repeal of capital punishment in his catalog states that have recently moved away from the death penalty.

It never ceases to amaze me that the four practicing conservative Catholics on the court appear untroubled by these cases even though the Church itself in 2018 altered its Catechism to declare capital punishment "inadmissible". - gwc

Conduct Unbecoming: The Resumption of Federal Executions | UPDATES/University of Baltimore School of Law
by John Bessler - University of Maryland-Baltimore School of Law

Not since 2003, when an African-American man, Louis Jones, Jr., was put to death, has the federal government carried out an execution. In the coming days, though, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ), led by Attorney General William Barr, plans to change that by once again putting to use the federal execution chamber at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Barr, on July 25, 2019, had previously directed the federal Bureau of Prisons to schedule five executions, three of which were later scheduled for mid-July of this year. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. government made plans to execute three men—Daniel Lee, Wesley Purkey, and Dustin Honken—in quick succession, a plan reminiscent of when Arkansas, in 2017, planned to execute eight men over the course of just 11 days. “I am devastated by the prospect of exposing myself and others to the risk of COVID-19 infection because the U.S. government chooses to execute Dustin and others in the midst of this pandemic,” laments Rev. Mark O’Keefe, a moral theology professor at Indiana’s St. Meinrad Seminary and the 64-year-old spiritual advisor to Dustin Honken.

***As Justice Breyer wrote in that dissent: “Today’s administration of the death penalty involves three fundamental constitutional defects: (1) serious unreliability, (2) arbitrariness in application, and (3) unconscionably long delays that undermine the death penalty’s penological purpose. Perhaps as a result, (4) most places within the United States have abandoned its use.” The number of American death sentences and executions has dwindled dramatically in recent years, making the death penalty’s administration more arbitrary than ever.