An explosive Reuters investigation revealed Friday that a series of executions the Trump administration has planned for next week “will mark the culmination of a three-year campaign to line up a secret supply chain to make and test lethal injection drugs.”
The U.S. Supreme Court on June 29 cleared the way for federal executions to resume when it denied to hear an appeal from death row prisoners challenging the Trump administration’s lethal injection protocol. Inmates Daniel Lewis Lee, Wesley Ira Purkey, and Dustin Lee Honken are set to be killed at a federal facility in Indiana just days apart beginning on July 13, followed by Keith Dwayne Nelson on August 28.
Although it wasn’t until July 2019 when U.S. Attorney General William Barr publicly directed the Bureau of Prisons to resume capital punishment using only the drug pentobarbital—in lieu of a three-drug protocol that had been hampered by supply issues—Reuters reported that “President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice had started building the network of contractors it would need by May 2017.” Continue reading.