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Introducing: Rush to Kill

Coming Oct. 12: Rush to Kill, a WFIU podcast.

All federal executions in the United States are carried out in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Isolated from the facility’s general population, and under extra layers of security, 44 condemned men are held in the U.S. prison bureau’s Special Confinement Unit — America’s death row. But actual executions at that level are extraordinarily rare. For two decades, the U.S. didn’t carry out even one.

Everything changed in July 2020, when President Donald Trump’s attorney general instructed the U.S. justice department to reopen the Terre Haute death chamber and start killing people again.

To satisfy transparency requirements, the prison bureau allowed a small pool of journalists inside the death chamber to document parts of the execution process. For six months, WFIU sent a team of public radio reporters to Terre Haute over and over to report on each of the 13 executions in person. And when the killing finally ended in January 2021, we kept reporting. For two years, the team collected documents and interviewed sources connected to every execution carried out by the U.S. government since 2001.

The federal death penalty is supposed to be the “gold standard” of justice, reserved for the “worst of the worst” offenders. Our reporting found the opposite. Experts believe U.S. prison bureau employees “botched” half or more of the executions, prolonging the dying process and possibly inflicting extreme pain. All of this happened at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Executions became super-spreader events, sickening prisoners and staff alike throughout the larger complex.

For the 44 men on federal death row, the upcoming presidential election is a matter of life and death. Under President Joe Biden there’s a moratorium on federal death sentences, but Biden hasn’t followed through on his campaign promise to repeal the death penalty. That leaves the door open for a Republican candidate to resume executions.

 

Our team

George Hale covers federal death row at WFIU. He was part of the public media team that spent six months reporting on the Trump execution spree. The team’s execution coverage earned multiple awards, including a regional Edward R. Murrow award.

Contributors: WFIU researcher Cathy Knapp, News Director Sara Wittmeyer, Editor Perry Metz

The Rush to Kill team is also grateful for significant support provided by NPR, including Graham Smith and Meg Anderson from the NPR Investigations Desk as well as Eva Tesfaye, Lauren Gonzales, Adelina Lancianese and Argin Hutchins.

More than a dozen other public radio journalists contributed original reporting.

Episodes air every week through November 30.

Rush to Kill is available at wfiu.org/rushtokill.

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