Federal government executed more inmates in 2020 than all states combined, says watchdog group

The federal government executed more inmates this year than all of the states combined for the first time in U.S. history, a death penalty watchdog group said in a study released Wednesday.

The Trump Justice Department resumed federal executions this year after a 17-year hiatus and has executed 10 prisoners. In the 19 states with the death penalty, seven inmates were put to death, according to a report by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).

“What was happening in the rest of the country showed that the administration’s policies were not just out of step with the historical practices of previous presidents, they were also completely out of step with today’s state practices,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the DPIC and lead author of the report.

The 17 total executions are the lowest amount since 1991 and the fewest state executions since 1983, according to the DPIC.

The DPIC doesn’t take a side in the debate over the death penalty, Mr. Dunham has said, but has criticized how states and the federal government carry out the death penalty, singling out problems with racial bias and secrecy, among other things.

The coronavirus pandemic and waning public support for the death penalty were among the reasons for the lower number of executions, according to the report. In 2019, 22 inmates were executed at the state level.

Mr. Dunham described the Trump administration’s ramp-up in executions as “historically unprecedented.”

The federal government’s 10 executions were the most in a five-month period than in any other presidency in the 20th or 21st centuries. They also mark the first time a lame-duck president has scheduled executions in more than a century, the report said.

The Trump administration has three more executions scheduled before President-elect Joseph R. Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20.Among those set to be executed is Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row. Montgomery was convicted of killing a pregnant woman in 2004 and cutting the baby out of her womb.

If put to death, she will be the first woman executed in roughly 60 years.

Texas accounted for three of the seven state executions in 2020; there was one each in Alabama, Georgia, Missouri and Tennessee, the report says.

Texas was also the last state to carry out a death sentence this year, executing Billy Wardlow on July 8 for fatally shooting an 82-year-old man in 1993.U.S. prison officials carried out their first execution since 2003 just six days later, putting Daniel Lewis Lee to death for killing an Arkansas family in a 1990s plot to build a whites-only nation in the Pacific Northwest.

The DPIC report cited a 2020 Gallup poll in which 43% of respondents said they oppose the death penalty — the highest level of opposition to capital punishment that Gallup registered since 1966.

⦁ This article is based in part on wire service reports.