More than 70 House and Senate Democrats announced Tuesday that they will reintroduce a bill ending the federal death penalty, enacting one of President-elect Joe Biden's campaign promises. 
Michael Dukakis sank his 1988 campaign for the White House with a single question at the second presidential debate: If his wife were raped and murdered, would he support executing her killer? The Democratic nominee's jumbled answer, defending opposition even to that death, is considered one of the factors that led to George H.W. Bush's eventual landslide victory that November.
Georgia Democratic Senate hopeful Raphael Warnock called the death penalty the "final failsafe of white supremacy" in a 2013 speech. 
News reports and social media commentators have repeatedly claimed that Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the frontrunner to succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court, argued Catholic judges must recuse themselves from death penalty cases in a 1998 law review article. In fact, the paper argues almost the opposite.
The federal Bureau of Prisons on Wednesday evening carried out the execution of convicted murderer Lezmond Mitchell, meaning president Donald Trump's administration has now conducted the most federal executions since Dwight Eisenhower's terms in office. 
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has been silent on the news that Boston Marathon bombing perpetrator Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will need a new trial in order to be executed—a trial Biden's Justice Department would prosecute, if he is elected. 
Convicted child rapist and murderer Wesley Purkey was put to death on Thursday morning, over half a day after his execution was scheduled thanks to what one judge called the "procedural gamesmanship" of his legal counsel. 
D.C. District Court judge Tanya S. Chutkan on Wednesday halted the scheduled execution of a federal death row inmate, marking another instance of the Obama appointee stalling the Department of Justice's efforts to restart federal executions. 
White nationalist and child murderer Daniel Lewis Lee was put to death Tuesday morning, following a late-night wave of the legal dispute that has come to typify the push to restart the federal death penalty. A convicted child-killer and white supremacist enjoyed a temporary reprieve on Monday, as legal headwinds in 2 separate appeals forestalled the first federal execution in 17 years. 