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U.S. House Oversight Committee Launches Investigation into Resumption of Federal Executions

The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform announced on August 14, 2019 that it has launched an investigation into the Department of Justice’s plan to restart federal executions using the drug pentobarbital. Citing concerns about the source of drugs the Administration intends to use in five executions it has scheduled in December 2019 and January 2020, the Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties has sought documents and information from the Department of Justice (DOJ) related to Attorney General William Barr’s announcement on July 25, 2019 that the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) would resume executions after a sixteen-year hiatus.

The letter, signed by Subcommittee Chair Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), seeks information about the manufacturer of the pentobarbital the government plans to use to execute prisoners in its new one-drug execution protocol, the procurement process, and whether the BOP has already acquired the drugs. “We are extremely concerned about the types of facilities from which the Bureau will obtain its pentobarbital, whether the Bureau will be able to guarantee that its intended method of execution is as painless as possible, and whether the Bureau will be subject to rigorous protocols to prevent the problems that have occurred at the state level,” Raskin and Pressley wrote.

The Administration’s new execution plan is similar to the single-drug execution process used in Texas, Missouri, and Georgia. Collectively, those state have carried out 92 pentobarbital executions since January 2014, two thirds of the lethal-injection executions in the United States during that period.

“Numerous reports document the dangers associated with pentobarbital and the difficulty in procuring reliable doses,” the letter says. “Texas reportedly purchased its supply from a compounding pharmacy whose state license was on probation for providing dangerous drug mixtures to children; the same pharmacy was warned by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about ‘serious deficiencies in [its] practices for producing sterile drug products.’ Missouri reportedly purchased its pentobarbital from a pharmacy that has repeatedly been found to engage in hazardous pharmaceutical procedures.”

Life Sentence in America’s Deadliest Death-Penalty County Illustrates Impact of Alabama’s End of Judicial Override

A life sentence recently imposed in America’s deadliest death-penalty county illustrates the impact of Alabama’s 2017 repeal of its former law permitting trial judges to impose the death penalty despite jury votes for life. On August 9, 2019, Houston County Judge Larry Anderson sentenced Nathaniel Dennis to life in prison without parole for the murder of a convenience store clerk, after the jury in his case recommended a life sentence. According to news reports, Anderson had wanted to impose a death sentence, and only reluctantly acquiesced in the jury’s recommendation.

Alabama was the last state in the U.S. to abolish judicial override, which accounts for approximately 20% of all Alabama death sentences and 11 of its 66 executions. It remains the only state in the country to permit a trial judge to impose a death sentence based upon a non-unanimous jury recommendation for death.

Houston County has imposed more death sentences by far than any other county its size. Despite a population just over 100,000, it currently has 19 people on its death row — the highest per capita death row of any county with more than two death-row prisoners. As of January 1, 2013, Houston County’s death row ranked 30th in size among all counties in the United States, even though it was less than one-quarter the size of any other county in the top thirty and two-thirds of those counties had populations of more than one million.