Poised

Always seeking to do the worst thing.

The U.S. government is poised to carry out the death penalty for the first time in nearly two decades, the Justice Department announced Thursday.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr has instructed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to change the federal execution protocol to include capital punishment, the Justice Department said.

Barr also asked the prisons bureau to schedule the executions of five inmates who have been found guilty of murder. According to the DOJ, the victims in each case included children and the elderly. In some of the cases, the convicted murderers also tortured and raped their victims.

“The Justice Department upholds the rule of law — and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” Barr said in a statement.

“We owe it to the victims and their families to kill someone.” I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s how owing works. I don’t think that’s how a government pays a debt to a set of people. I don’t think vengeance is a debt owed by government.

In the past 10 years, at least five states — New Mexico, Illinois, Connecticut, Maryland and New Hampshire — have abolished the death penalty, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. And in March, California Gov. Gavin Newsom put an executive moratoriumon his state’s death penalty.

In two more states — Washington and Delaware — courts recently ruled that their capital punishment laws are unconstitutional.

Capital punishment has also been criticized because of the risk that the justice system may erroneously convict and punish someone who’s innocent.

“Since 1973, more than 160 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S. have been exonerated,” according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

But with Barr as AG the Federal Government is determined to be worse than the states that abolished the death penalty, and to ignore the risk of executing people who didn’t commit the relevant crime.

13 Responses to “Poised”