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Activists Call on President Biden to End the Federal Death Penalty Before Leaving Office

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A conversation with Death Penalty Action Co-founder and Executive Director Abe Bonowitz. Now that Joe Biden is a lame duck president, activists are holding him accountable to make good on his promise to end the federal death penalty during his remaining six months as president. Biden’s election campaign in 2020 had pledged to end the federal death penalty and incentivize the remaining 27 states that still allow executions to do the same. While he made history as the first president in the United States to openly oppose the death penalty, there has been no movement to actually end federal executions during his nearly four years in office.

Tennessee plans executions in secret

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Tennessee Death Chamber
The state of Tennessee doesn't want you to know how it will kill the condemned.

It doesn't want you to know who will flip the switch, sending a lethal dose of pentobarbital through the veins of death row inmates. And it doesn't want you to know how it obtained that pentobarbital — which isn't available from any legal drug manufacturer — as well. State correction officials have even banned the media from visiting inmates on death row.

As Tennessee makes an unprecedented push to set execution dates, it is doing so in the shadows, cloaking its plans in secrecy. Legislators passed a bill a year ago that allowed the state to withhold all information about the drugs it plans to use to execute death row inmates. Georgia, Oklahoma and Missouri have enacted similar laws shrouding information about their lethal injection drugs.

But a collection of death row inmates has sued Tennessee to pull back that shroud.

They're not a particularly sympathetic group: 11 murderers, convicted of some of the state's most heinous crimes. Nine already have execution dates scheduled. But they want one simple question answered first: How will the state kill us?

"Tennesseans should be concerned because these executions are ostensibly for them," said Kelley Henry, an assistant federal public defender who represents some of the death row inmates. "They are carried out in the name of the people.

"The people have a right to know that the Department of Corrections isn't torturing citizens using public funds."


Source: The Tennessean, March 23, 2014
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