The federal government can seek death sentences for a limited set of crimes, but federal executions are much more rare than state executions.
The federal death penalty applies in all 50 states and U.S. territories but is used relatively rarely. There are 40 prisoners on the federal death row, most of whom are imprisoned in Terre Haute, Indiana. Sixteen federal executions have been carried out in the modern era, all by lethal injection, with 13 occurring in a six-month period between July 2020 and January 2021.
The federal death penalty was held unconstitutional following the Supreme Court’s opinion of Furman v. Georgia in 1972. Unlike the quick restoration of the death penalty in most states, the federal death penalty was not reinstated until 1988, and then only for a very narrow class of offenses. The Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 greatly expanded the number of eligible offenses to about 60.
The use of the federal death penalty in jurisdictions that have themselves opted not to have capital punishment—such as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and many states—has raised particular concerns about federal overreach into state matters.
In an August 31 , 2024 , editorial from The New York Times, the newspaper’s editorial board writes that capital punishment is “ immoral, unconstitutional and useless as a deterrent to crime,” and asserts that President Joseph Biden should follow through with his campaign pledge to end the federal death penalty. The Times believes “ it would be an appropriate and humane finale to his presidency for Mr. Biden to fulfill that pledge and try to eliminate the death penalty for federal…
Recent reporting by The Intercept confirms a story aired in April 2024 on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver identifying Connecticut-based Absolute Standards as the source of the execution drugs used in 13 federal executions in 2020 and 2021 . Absolute Standards produces materials for calibrating research equipment, but in 2018 , it applied to the Drug Enforcement Administration to be registered as a bulk producer of pentobarbital, the anesthetic used in federal executions and in many…
On March 21 , 2024 , the 1 st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the judge who presided over Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s (pictured) trial to investigate his defense attorneys’ claims of juror bias and determine whether Mr. Tsarnaev’s death sentence should be overturned because of this bias. In a 2 – 1 decision, the 1 st Circuit declined defense attorney requests to overturn Mr. Tsarnaev’s death sentence for his participation in the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing but found that the trial judge “ fell…
On January 12 , 2024 , the U.S. Department of Justice ( DOJ ) announced that it will seek a death sentence for Payton Gendron, the then- 18 -year-old who killed 10 Black people at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York in 2022 . This is the first capital case authorized by Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Biden Administration’s DOJ . The announcement came twenty months after the mass shooting and eleven months after Mr. Gendron pled guilty to state first degree murder charges and was…
According to statements from several federal death row prisoners, the new “ adverse conditions” on death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, contributed to the December 1 , 2023 death of Nasih Khalil Ra’id. Fellow prisoners say Mr. Ra’id, whose given name at birth was Odell Corley, died by suicide. Prison officials have not released the report from Mr. Ra’id’s autopsy or commented on the cause of his…
