US Attorney General, William Barr, has issued an order allowing the federal government to resume the use of death penalty for the first time in more than 15 years.
A statement from the Department of Justice on Thursday quoted Barr as saying that five inmates were already lined up for execution.
According to him, the first execution is scheduled for December 9, and the remaining four over the following weeks.
Additional executions will be scheduled at a later date.
US President, Donald Trump, has been a long time vocal advocate of the death penalty, going back to his days as an outspoken real-estate mogul.
As president, he has kept up a hard-line approach.
“I think they should very much bring the death penalty into vogue,’’ Trump said after a shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
In March, he was highly critical of California, after the governor suspended capital punishment in the nation’s most populous state.
The federal decision by Barr will affect only cases within that system, as US states separately decide whether or not to use capital punishment in their criminal justice systems.
Barr’s order says the government will use a single drug for executions.
Saying this is in line with the practice in several states, rather than a three drug cocktail that has been caught up in legal challenges.
Some 20 states have banned the death penalty, while others have not carried out executions in decades.
The last time the federal government executed someone was in 2003, one in less than a handful of such cases since the death penalty was reinstated at the federal level in 1988.
While there has not been a federal execution in more than 15 years, federal attorneys have continued to carry out death penalty prosecutions.
The first person set to be executed under Barr’s new order is Daniel Lewis Lee, a member of a white supremacist group, who murdered a family of three, including an eight-year-old girl.
He was convicted in 1999 and has since been sitting on death row.
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