By Douglas Hook
MassLive.com, Springfield, Mass.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley introduced a bill to counter the federal governments plans to start executions for the first time in almost two decades.
Pressley, a Massachusetts Democrat, brought the bill to the House of Representatives the same day that Attorney General William P. Barr made the decision to continue executions of inmates after a 16-year interval, including that of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Since introducing the legislation, at least 14 Democrats have backed the legislation, including Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Republican Congressman Justin Amash also backed the bill.
Support for the death penalty has been steadily growing in the U.S. with the Pew Research Center stating that American support for capital punishment in murder cases has risen 54 percent since 2016. While the share of Americans supporting the death penalty has risen since 2016, it remains much lower than in the 1990s or throughout much of the 2000s.
“Congress has expressly authorized the death penalty through legislation adopted by the people’s representatives in both houses of Congress and signed by the President,” Barr said in a statement from the Department of Justice.
Prosecutors will be seeking the death penalty for some cases, including Wesley Ira Purkey, who raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl and is scheduled for execution on Dec. 13.
Pressley retorted to the DOJ’s proposed plan on Twitter, saying “The death penalty has no place in a just society.”
The legislation would stop the use of the death penalty for violations of federal law and require that any person already sentenced to die for a federal crime be re-sentenced.
The last federal execution was under the Bush administration in 2003 of Louis Jones Jr. by lethal injection. His last words were, “I love you.”
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