WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Wednesday halted the executions of four federal prisoners that were scheduled to begin next month, essentially stymieing the Trump administration’s plan to resume the use of the death penalty.
Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued an injunction late Wednesday that said that the executions would prevent the inmates from pursuing legal challenges to the use of lethal injection.
A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.
In July, Attorney General William P. Barr announced that the government would resume executions of death row inmates after a hiatus of nearly two decades. In the intervening years, public support for capital punishment has waned, prompting 21 states to outlaw the practice.
“The Justice Department upholds the rule of law, and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” Mr. Barr said at the time.
He said that five men who had been convicted of murdering children would be executed by lethal injection in December and January at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind. The men were chosen, in part, because the Justice Department said that they had exhausted their appeals. More executions would follow, Mr. Barr added.
The attorney general issued a protocol to use a single drug, pentobarbital, rather than a three-drug procedure that had been used in federal executions. The particular drug cocktail had fallen out of favor because botched executions prompted a slew of lawsuits as well as discussion within the Justice Department to eliminate the federal death penalty altogether.
President Trump has been a staunch supporter of the death penalty, and he has said that drug dealers should be executed. And Mr. Barr supported capital punishment when he worked in the Justice Department during the George Bush administration. “That penalty would send a message to drug dealers and gangs,” Mr. Barr wrote in an op-ed article in The New York Times in 1991, when he was acting attorney general.
Four of the men who were scheduled for execution this winter joined a federal lawsuit in Washington that challenged the use of the three-drug cocktail. They asked Judge Chutkan to block their executions until their legal claims could be heard, a request that she granted.
Last month, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit blocked the execution of the fifth man, who was scheduled to die in December.
Federal prosecutors rarely seek the death penalty, but they successfully did so for Dylann S. Roof, the avowed white supremacist who shot and killed nine African-American churchgoers in 2015, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber.
Since the federal government reinstated the death penalty in 1988, only three inmates have been executed: Timothy J. McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, in 2001; Juan Garza, convicted of murder and drug trafficking, in 2001; and Louis Jones Jr., convicted of the rape and murder of a female soldier, in 2003.