A new ProPublica report takes a deeper dive into the Trump administration's rush to execute death row prisoners in Trump’s last months, and now last weeks, in office.
The whole piece is good and worth a read, but a few points stand out. Officials in the Department of Justice and Bureau of Prisons have been itching to resume executions since 2011, but it was Jeff Sessions who began pressing from the top to "move forward" on getting it done. The Bureau of Prisons "planned to have the executions carried out by two private contractors," whose identities are kept secret and who are paid in cash. There was a lot of wrangling to obtain drugs to carry out the executions and new paid "expert" opinions on why they could use them, and if you are a death penalty opponent then certainly everything about this will look skeevy because it pretty much is.
But there is a great deal of support in law enforcement for executions, so it's not surprising that the efforts to resume federal executions had some diligent supporters inside federal ranks.
Still, however, what comes out more than anything is the real sense of urgency William Barr in particular brought to the effort. Sessions may have pressured for executions to resume, but Barr put his own rush and stamp on the efforts. In familiar Barr style, it wasn't enough to resume federal executions: It had to be done with lies, rule-bending, and maximum dickishness.
Barr picked out which prisoners would be executed, chosen for the heinousness of their crimes. Barr fibbed in his public announcements about it, just as Barr has done in other announcements. Barr set the schedule for "back-to-back" executions, three in a week, or maybe didn't, depending on which administration liars you believe over the others. Barr's Justice Department killed one prisoner while his lawyers were appealing the case, resulting in the appeals court meekly declaring the appeal as "moot" in their response.
But a particular note might be made about Barr's seemingly out-of-nowhere push to have the government be once again allowed to execute prisoners via firing squad, of all things. This bit of extravagant vulgarity was evidently not as random as it appeared; it was proposed just two weeks after lawyers for death row prisoners had "argued that overdosing on pentobarbital would be so excruciating that even death by firing squad would be less painful."
Though Barr's team defended their chosen drug with a response brushing off firing squads as "more primitive" and "regressive," two weeks later Barr’s department proposed new regulations that would reintroduce firing squads.
ProPublica points to this as an admission by the Justice Department that their previous legal claims needed cleaning up. That is one interpretation. We have gleaned more than enough knowledge of Barr's team and methods to suspect that this embrace of previously acknowledged "more primitive" and "regressive" means of executing prisoners might instead have simply been a purposeful thumb in the eye to death penalty opponents—an explicit confirmation, from Barr, that in fact his team intended to push forward on executions not just despite debates over the cruelty of their chosen drugs, but with whatever additional "primitive" cruelty might be required.
The cruelty, as has often been said of the newest brand of conservatism, is the point.
The Barr push to execute as many prisoners as can be executed before his team runs out of time will, as it turns out, outlast Barr himself. He has now resigned, but there are three more executions scheduled to be carried out before Joe Biden, a death penalty opponent, takes office. It is impossible not to see the record number of executions under Barr's short tenure as anything other than the continued fetishization of killing, one of the few remaining obsessions in a conservative movement that has gone flaccid on whatever other principles it once had in favor of overt authoritarianism.
