Notable press account of federal execution spree at end of the Trump Administration

Given all the attention usually given to everything surrounding death penalty policy and administration, I have been somewhat surprised not to see more enduring discussions of all the federal executions that the Trump Administration carried out in its final months.  But now I see this lengthy new AP article on this interesting topic under the headline “Fuller picture emerges of the 13 federal executions at the end of Trump’s presidency.”  Here is how the article begins:

A day before the federal government executed a Texas man for the killing of an Iowa couple when he was 18, celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz pleaded with then-President Donald Trump — a former client — to call the execution off. During a Dec. 9, 2020, call to the White House, Dershowitz told Trump that Brandon Bernard, at 40, wasn’t the man he was when Todd and Stacie Bagley were killed in 1999 and that he deserved to have his sentence commuted to life in prison.

Trump sounded sincere when he said he wished he could spare Bernard’s life, but he added apologetically that he’d already promised the victims’ relatives that Bernard would be put to death, Dershowitz said about the 20-minute call.  “‘They’re on their way. They’re on their way,’” Trump kept saying, Dershowitz recalled. The relatives, Trump explained, were on the road to the prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where federal executions are carried out and it was “‘too late to pull them back.’”

Bernard was executed the next day.

Secrecy was a hallmark of the 13 federal executions during the last six months of Trump’s presidency. Although reporters were allowed to witness them, it was impossible to know at the time what was happening behind the scenes.

Fresh details have emerged since the executions, including from Dershowitz, who spoke recently to The Associated Press. The fuller picture reveals that officials cut corners and relied on a pliant Supreme Court to get the executions done, even when some — including Trump himself, in Bernard’s case — agreed that there might be valid reasons not to proceed with them all.

Here is some more interesting passages from the article:

Other newly available information includes an autopsy report obtained by the AP for Corey Johnson, convicted of seven drug-related killings. It concluded that during his execution, he suffered pulmonary edema, a painful condition akin to drowning. So much fluid rushed up his trachea that some exited his mouth….

Trump’s 2016 win didn’t particularly worry federal death row inmates, prisoner Billie Allen, who was and remains in the unit, said by email. After all, there hadn’t been a public clamor for federal executions to resume following a 17-year hiatus.

But guards began practicing executions in 2019, including by wheeling other guards role-playing as inmates out of cells in restraint chairs. “It was a sign … executions were about to take place,” Allen said. “Many of us knew Trump was going to keep killing … until he ran out of time.”

Observers assumed it was Trump’s initiative. But in his 2022 book, “One Damn Thing After Another,” Trump’s attorney general at the time of the executions, Bill Barr, suggested it was actually his. Barr said he spoke to Trump just once about the plans. Regarding capital punishment, Trump asked, “Why do you support it?” Barr wrote that Trump seemed satisfied when he answered that for brutal killings, it was “the only punishment that fit the crime.”