U.S. Supreme Court agrees to fast-track briefs in federal death penalty case

The Supreme Court agreed Thursday to fast-track filings in a case involving the Trump administration’s plans to resume federal executions this summer, which death-row inmates challenging their scheduled lethal injections hope the justices will agree to take up.

The court ordered the death-row inmates and federal officials to submit briefs in the coming days, before the justices determine whether to hear the case.

This order came three days after the Justice Department announced that officials had again scheduled executions as they seek to carry out federal death sentences for the first time since 2003.

Under the timeline laid out Monday, the Justice Department said it plans to carry out three lethal injections next month and a fourth in August. The department described the inmates involved as all convicted of murdering children.

This marked the second time in the past 12 months that the Justice Department has attempted to schedule executions. When Attorney General William P. Barr announced last summer that the Justice Department had adopted a new lethal-injection protocol, officials laid out a timetable for resuming executions that wound up blocked by court challenges.

Last year, a federal judge blocked four scheduled executions, saying the Trump administration’s execution protocol did not abide by the Federal Death Penalty Act because the 1994 law required federal executions be carried out “in the manner prescribed by the law of the State in which the sentence is imposed.” (A fifth execution was separately blocked.)

A divided federal appeals court panel split 2 to 1 earlier this year in siding with the Trump administration, issuing three opinions that took different perspectives on what the law required for federal executions.

Attorneys for some of the death-row inmates have since asked the Supreme Court to take up the case, saying the justices had to resolve whether the execution protocol adopted by the Justice Department is lawful. That protocol relies on a single drug, pentobarbital.

The Justice Department responded that the death-row inmates were saying the federal government could carry out executions only following “granular procedural details” used by states and urged the justices to reject their stay requests.

In its order Thursday, the court granted the motion filed by the death-row inmates seeking to expedite consideration of their petition. It ordered the Justice Department to file a response by Friday — which the department had already said it planned to do, acknowledging that the case could be fast-tracked.

A spokesman for the Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment Thursday, while an attorney for the death-row inmates declined to comment.

Barr has said the department has an obligation to carry out the executions of people who “have received full and fair proceedings.”

“We owe it to the victims of these horrific crimes, and to the families left behind, to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” Barr said in a statement Monday when the executions were rescheduled.

Attorneys for the four death-row inmates, meanwhile, decried the plans to schedule their executions. Ruth Friedman, an attorney for Daniel Lewis Lee, whose execution is scheduled first, called it “unconscionable” for the government to execute him. She also noted that among those opposing Lee’s execution were some relatives of the victims in his case, who said they believe he should be sentenced to life in prison rather than death.

Source: washingtonpost.com, Mark Berman, June 18, 2020. Mark Berman is a national reporter for The Washington Post who often focuses on law enforcement and criminal justice issues. He has been at The Post since 2007 and previously covered transportation and local news.

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