Why is the Trump administration fixated on resuming federal executions?

Published: July 13, 2020, 9:59 p.m.

The federal government was just prohibited from beginning executing death row prisoners again today. As if that’s not controversial enough, the government has been secretly experimenting with pentobarbital as the execution drug without telling the companies that manufacture it and without telling the people of St. Louis, MO that experiments in advance of the executions are taking place in the center of their city. Miriam Gohara, a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School who spent sixteen years representing death-sentenced clients in post-conviction litigation, as assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and then as a specially designated federal public defender with the Federal Capital Habeas Project, joins John.