Attorney General William Barr resumed federal executions in July 2019 after a 17-year hiatus to bring “justice to victims of the most horrific crimes.” Eight federal inmates have been put to death so far this year. Five more are scheduled to be executed.
While executions are carried out every year on the state level, federal executions were extremely rare until this year. In the 1970s, the Supreme Court found that executions were unconstitutional, but the ruling was later reversed. Under the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act, executions on the federal side were limited to specific offenses including homicide and non-homicide drug convictions.
According to federal law, the Bureau of Prisons is limited with carrying out executions “no sooner than 60 days from the entry of the judgment of death.”
These are the remaining death row inmates who are scheduled for execution:
• Brandon Bernard was 18 when he, Christopher Vialva, and others were convicted for the 1999 murder of a pair of youth ministers in Texas. Vialva, who was 19 at the time of the crime, was executed in September after exhausting his appeals. Bernard’s last request for a stay of execution to the Supreme Court was denied last Thursday. He’s scheduled to die on Dec. 10.
• Alfred Bourgeois was sentenced to death by a Texas jury for abusing, torturing, and ultimately beating his daughter to death in 2002. Bourgeois’s attorney Victor Abreu said in a statement on Friday that his client is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 11. After the Supreme Court ruled that another death row inmate cannot be executed because of his intellectual disability, Abreu is seeking to have Bourgeois’s case reheard to produce similar evidence.
• Lisa Montgomery is the first and only woman scheduled to be federally executed in nearly 70 years. Montgomery, who was convicted in 2004 for killing a pregnant woman, cutting the baby out and passing it off as her own, was granted a stay on her execution until Dec. 31 due to her attorney’s coronavirus diagnosis, and it is now set for Jan. 12. The Trump administration has rejected Montgomery’s request for a reprieve.
• Corey Johnson is scheduled for execution on Jan. 14 for killing seven people in 1992 as a part of a drug trade in Virginia. Johnson’s attorneys Ronald J. Tabak and Donald P. Salzman argue that no jury heard evidence to rule on his intellectual disability. According to Johnson’s attorneys, he has an IQ of 69, which would be lower than one standard offered by the Supreme Court as a guide for states weighing whether such an execution met the Constitution’s cruel and unusual punishment standards. Johnson’s co-defendant was spared a life sentence due to his own intellectual disability.
• On Jan. 15 the federal government is expected to execute Dustin Higgs. Higgs’s co-defendant and the convicted triggerman received life without parole for the 1996 killings of three women in Maryland. Higgs was convicted under a theory that even though he hadn’t pulled the trigger he had ordered the killings, his attorney said. One of the co-defendants testified that Higgs did order the shootings.
The CNN Wire contributed to this report
