A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration’s plan to resume executions of federal death row prisoners via lethal injection does not violate federal law.
As such, the fates of the four men, who are convicted murderers, are still uncertain and it is unclear whether federal executions would ultimately resume.
Efforts to Resume Federal Execution Stalled
While a number of individual states continue to carry out the death penalty, the federal government has not executed a prisoner since 2003. Since then, litigation over the drugs that were historically used in lethal injection executions prevented the government from continuing the practice.The lawsuits challenging federal lethal injections, the first of which was filed in 2005, challenged the execution protocol on the grounds that it violated the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment by carrying a risk of severe pain. The suits also said the protocol violated a federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act because it was written in secret without public input.
During the presidency of Barack Obama, the Justice Department abandoned its previous three-drug protocol due to a shortage of one of them—an anesthetic called sodium thiopental.
Specifically, Chutkan wrote that the government needs to use whatever methods the states use for executions, citing the FDPA, which states that executions be implemented “in the manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence is imposed.” In particular, she ruled that the government needed to comply with all “additional procedural details” of the execution protocol in a given state, such as what chemicals are used in that injection, or how the catheter is inserted.
Both Katsas and Rao rejected the inmates’ interpretation that the FDPA requires that federal executions be carried out in the exact manner provided by the state law, according to the court filing on Tuesday.
“Judge Katsas concludes that the FDPA regulates only the top-line choice among execution methods, such as the choice to use lethal injection instead of hanging or electrocution,” the decision reads.
“Judge Rao concludes that the FDPA also requires the federal government to follow execution procedures set forth in state statutes and regulations, but not execution procedures set forth in less formal state execution protocols,” the court also wrote.
“Judge Rao further concludes that the federal protocol allows the federal government to depart from its procedures as necessary to conform to state statutes and regulations. On either of their views, the plaintiffs’ primary FDPA claim is without merit.”
Judge Tatel in his opinion said he believed that the FDPA “requires federal executions to be carried out using the same procedures that states use to execute their own prisoners—procedures set forth not just in statutes and regulations, but also in protocols issued by state prison officials pursuant to state law.”
While the appeals court has now lifted Chutkan’s November 2019 ruling, it has left unresolved separate claims from the inmates brought under different federal laws, which Chutkan is set to address when the case returns to her.