The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) has quite a lot of interesting information regarding executions in the United States so far this year, including how the Coronavirus Pandemic has impacted capital punishment in the first half of 2020. Consider the following:
- There have been ten (10) executions in 2020.
- One execution has been by electrocution (Tennessee’s execution of Nicholas Todd Sutton in February 2020).
- Pentobarbital still predominates in lethal injection protocols as a single-drug fatal dose execution method.
- The State of Florida has not executed anyone in 2020.
- The federal government resumed executions in 2020 after a 17 year hiatus.
- Within one week’s time in July 2020, the federal government executed three men: Daniel Lewis Lee (July 14, 2020); Wesley Ira Purkey (July 16, 2020); and Dustin Lee Honken (July 17, 2020).
- The federal government’s chosen form of execution is lethal injection using single-drug pentobarbital.
- There has been extensive appellate challenge to the federal execution protocol, including this significant amici curiae brief filed by an impressive list of scholars and judges.
- The federal government has set August 26, 2020 as the execution date for the only Native American on its Death Row, Lezmond Mitchell, despite objections from the Navajo Nation (which include the fact that the killing itself occurred on tribal land); and
- The United States Military has five (5) Death Row inmates, with the last military execution occurring on April 13, 1961, when U.S. Army Private John A. Bennett was hanged (conviction: rape and attempted murder). (That’s right: 1961. Not a typo.)