Attorney General William Barr announced Thursday that the federal government will be resuming capital punishment after 16 years, with the Bureau of Prisons already scheduled to execute 5 people on death row, CNN reports.
The “five death-row inmates [are] convicted of murdering, and in some cases torturing and raping, the most vulnerable in our society — children and the elderly,” according to a Department of Justice statement. They are scheduled to be executed using pentobarbital, which replaces the three-drug procedure previously used in federal executions, CNN reports
“Saying that you are going to adopt a protocol is not the same thing as having a protocol properly adopted through the required administrative procedures,” said Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a group that has been critical of how the penalty is administered. “You can’t just say it and have it happen. There is a legal process for a protocol to go into effect and there is a legal process for challenging the protocol.”
There has been an informal moratorium in place for almost two decades, which stayed in place during the Obama administration, the Washington Post reports.
The last federal execution was in 2003.