It's been 20 years since U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun announced, "I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death."
The late Justice's former colleagues have not followed suit. With the Supreme Court's general approval, the United States continues to be among the world's leading executioners. From 2007 through 2012, five countries executed more than 200 prisoners: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the United States.
Attorney General Eric Holder says he's opposed to the capital punishment. But his Department of Justice, despite some modest tinkering in 2009 and 2011, has maintained the federal machinery of death that existed throughout George W. Bush's presidency.
It was during Bush's tenure that federal prisoners were executed for the first time in 38 years.
During the Bush era one of DOJ's most contested policies was to seek the death penalty even in states that had discontinued executions (either by statute or custom). Under Attorney General John Ashcroft, DOJ reversed the Clinton-era presumption that capital punishment wouldn't be sought in non-death penalty states. (Attorney General Janet Reno on occasion found that the presumption was rebutted by other circumstances.)
And Holder has maintained the Ashcroft policy that the federal government won't be restrained in seeking executions in non-death penalty states, sometimes relentlessly.
The policy has been met with resistance in some quarters, including by those who are usually friendly with the Administration.
Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee denied Holder's demaned to transfer a prisoner - who had already received a sentence of life without parole - to the federal government:
To voluntarily let (the prisoner) be exposed to the federal death penalty for a crime committed in Rhode Island would be an abdication of one of my core responsibilities as governor: defending and upholding the legitimate public-policy choices made by the people of this state.
President Clinton didn't oversee any federal executions. But the so-called Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which he lobbied for and signed (also 20 years ago), has made it much
easier for states to carry out death sentences.
Will President Obama become the first Democrat to oversee a federal execution in more than four decades?
No execution dates have yet been set for those currently on federal death row.
Holder is widely expected to soon announce his next attempt to impose capital punishment in a non-death penalty state.