proPublica: Inside Trump and Barr’s Last-Minute Killing Spree

[Winehole23]

In its hurry to use its final days in power to execute federal prisoners, the administration of President Donald Trump has trampled over an array of barriers, both legal and practical, according to court records that have not been previously reported.


Officials gave public explanations for their choice of which prisoners should die that misstated key facts from the cases. They moved ahead with executions in the middle of the night. They left one prisoner strapped to the gurney while lawyers worked to remove a court order. They executed a second prisoner while an appeal was still pending, leaving the court to then dismiss the appeal as “moot” because the man was already dead. They bought drugs from a secret pharmacy that failed a quality test. They hired private executioners and paid them in cash.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-trump-and-barrs-last-minute-killing-spree

[Winehole23]

a ProPublica review of internal government records shows that Barr did not act alone. The push to resume federal executions for the first time since 2003 long predates Barr, with groundwork beginning as far back as 2011 and accelerating after Trump took office in 2017. It could not have happened without the help of Justice Department lawyers; officials at the Bureau of Prisons; two professors who endorsed the government’s injection method; conservative Supreme Court justices who dismissed final appeals; and Trump himself, who encouraged the executions and declined to commute them.

[Winehole23]

https://assets-c3.propublica.org/images/articles/_threeTwo400w/[email protected]

[Winehole23]

For unclear reasons, BOP planned to have the executions carried out by two private contractors, rather than government employees. The government won’t disclose the contractors’ names or profession, and it pays them in cash. “If we didn’t pay them in cash,” a BOP lawyer said in a deposition, “they probably wouldn’t participate.”

[Winehole23]

BOP planned to import powdered pentobarbital from a “foreign FDA-registered facility (https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20425408-admin-record-bop-protocol#document/p864)” but later turned to a domestic bulk manufacturer (https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20425408-admin-record-bop-protocol#document/p877). It also hired a compounding pharmacy to create an injectable solution. The government has guarded vendor identities, since public scrutiny could pressure them to back out.

A sample of the compounding pharmacy’s solution failed a quality test (https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20431675-bradweinsheimer_pdftran#document/p203) by an outside lab. But according to Weinsheimer, BOP said the problem was the lab (https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20431675-bradweinsheimer_pdftran#document/p205), not the compound itself, and sent a new batch to a different lab (https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20431675-bradweinsheimer_pdftran#document/p200).

BOP also explored using a different drug: the opioid fentanyl. In a March 2018 memo (https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20425408-admin-record-bop-protocol#document/p867), then-BOP Director Mark S. Inch said BOP found a fentanyl supplier but warned “there may be negative publicity associated with using a drug to which so many Americans are addicted.”

[Winehole23]

There are three more federal executions scheduled in January — eight, six and five days before Biden’s inauguration.