Fourteen US States Back Trump Effort to Revive Federal Executions for Murderers - Reports

WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 05th December, 2019) Fourteen US states have filed a joint brief to the Supreme Court in support of President Donald Trump's program to renew the practice of executing convicted murderers who have received the death penalty, media reported.

All of the 14 states still maintain capital punishment in their laws and legal systems. They filed the brief a day the Trump administration petitioned the Supreme Court to permit four executions of convicted murders in coming weeks, The Hill newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The 14 states presenting the legal brief are Arizona, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas and Utah, The Hill said.

The executions were indefinitely delayed in November when a Federal trial judge ruled that a separate legal challenge to the Trump administration's new lethal injection protocol needed to b go through a full process of assessment in the US legal system first, the report added.

In July, Attorney General William Barr said executions would start again of convicted prisoners on death row using a new lethal injection procedure that employed the drug pentobarbital sodium.