From [HERE] In a memorandum that left to Congress the task of addressing systemic questions of arbitrariness, racial discrimination, and wrongful convictions affecting the administration of the federal death penalty, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland (pictured) issued a directive formally pausing federal executions while the Department of Justice (DOJ) undertakes a review of executive branch policies adopted in the last two years of the Trump administration.

Garland’s memorandum, issued late in the day June 30, 2021, prior to the federal government's closure for the July 4th holiday weekend, was as expansive in touting constitutional guarantees as it was narrow in its focus for action. “The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely. That obligation has special force in capital cases,” Garland wrote.

Garland said, “[s]erious concerns have been raised about the continued use of the death penalty across the country, including arbitrariness in its application, disparate impact on people of color, and the troubling number of exonerations in capital and other serious cases.” However, while describing these issues as “weighty concerns,” Garland said they “deserve careful study and evaluation by lawmakers.” While others address those issues, Garland said, the Department of Justice must “take care to scrupulously maintain our commitment to fairness and humane treatment in the administration of existing federal laws governing capital sentences.” 

The Attorney General said DOJ would review three changes to the department’s death-penalty policies and procedures that were adopted under attorneys general William Barr and Jeffrey Rosen. Those changes are: an addendum to the federal execution protocol, announced on July 25, 2019, that replaced the previous three-drug lethal injection procedure with a single-drug execution using the barbiturate pentobarbital; manner of execution regulations that, in certain circumstances, authorize the federal government to carry out executions by electric chair, firing squad, nitrogen hypoxia, or cyanide gas; and lame-duck revisions to DOJ’s Justice Manual that Garland said were “a departure from longstanding practice” and would “expedite the execution of capital sentences.”

Garland’s directive does not prevent federal prosecutors from seeking the death penalty in new cases, pursuing the death penalty in cases in which the Trump administration authorized capital prosecution, opposing appeals brought by current federal death-row prisoners, or seeking to reinstate death sentences that have been overturned by federal appeals courts. Most recently, the Garland Department of Justice argued in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that the court should uphold the death sentences imposed on Dylann Roof for the murders of nine African-American worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina and filed a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to restore the death sentence imposed on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for his role in the Boston Marathon bombing.