Supreme Court denies Trump request to immediately resume federal executions

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Supreme Court denies Trump request to immediately resume federal executions
By Harper Neidig - 12/06/19 07:08 PM EST

The Supreme Court on Friday denied the Trump administration's request to immediately lift a block on federal executions so that it could move forward with a death sentence that was scheduled to be carried out on Monday.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) had filed an emergency request with the court to vacate a stay of all four planned federal executions. A fifth execution has also been delayed for unrelated reasons.

The first was scheduled for Monday and the others were set to be carried out through December and January.

A federal judge last month ordered a hold on federal executions while a separate legal challenge over the DOJ's new lethal injection protocol plays out before an appeals court.

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https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/473469-supreme-court-denies-trump-request-to-resume-federal-executions-on

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SCOTUSblog by Amy Howe 12/6/2019

https://www.scotusblog.com/2019/12/justices-refuse-to-allow-federal-government-to-carry-out-executions-for-now/

Tonight the Supreme Court turned down a request from the federal government to allow the executions of four federal inmates to go forward. The first execution, of inmate Daniel Lee, had originally been scheduled for next Monday morning, but the government urged the justices to allow the executions to proceed, even if it would mean that the inmates would be executed while their appeals were still pending.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote a statement regarding tonight’s order, joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. The federal government, Alito suggested, “has shown that it is very likely to prevail when this question is ultimately decided.” Alito cited “strong evidence” that the district court’s interpretation of the federal law governing executions is incorrect, and he added that the district court’s reading of the law “would lead to results that Congress is unlikely to have intended.”

Overturning the district court’s bar on executions “would not necessarily mean that the prisoners in question would be executed before the merits of” their challenge can finally be resolved, Alito posited, because the inmates could raise other challenges to the government’s lethal-injection protocol. “Nevertheless,” Alito concluded, “in light of what is at stake, it would be preferable for the District Court’s decision to be reviewed on the merits” by the D.C. Circuit before the inmates are executed. Alito agreed with his colleagues that the D.C. Circuit should act quickly, writing that he sees “no reason why the Court of Appeals should not be able to decide this case, one way or the other, within the next 60 days.”