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.
In this episode, we’ll hear from experts convinced that justice officials considered race when they selected which people to kill — and when. Why that might be, and what it says about the federal death penalty’s ability to deliver justice, and mercy, without bias.
The U.S. Supreme Court prohibits executing people deemed mentally incompetent. But the Trump administration selected two people with severe mental illness for execution, including the only woman on federal death row.
This week, we’re looking back to the first executions ever carried out in Terre Haute. The death penalty promises closure, or justice, but does it deliver? And what changes when the victims of a crime number in the thousands?
How U.S. justice officials convinced top judges to sign off to kill 14 condemned Americans in the middle of a pandemic. How laws passed decades ago — by people in power today — made it all possible. And why it could happen again.
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons is reporting that a federal prisoner died in custody after a "perceived altercation" with another incarcerated individual. It was the Terre Haute facility's second deadly incident in as many months.
Just a few months after he took office, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a moratorium to halt federal executions. Now federal prosecutors say they will seek capital punishment for a white supremacist.
Friends of Nasih Khalil Ra’id say he was struggling to cope with conditions at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. The facility houses the U.S. prison bureau’s “Special Confinement Unit,” or federal death row.
The U.S. prison bureau reported the only Indiana resident on federal death row became unresponsive and died Friday. A spokesperson for the bureau declined to explain what caused Nasih Ra'id to become unresponsive.
“I'm calling for an expedited federal death penalty for anyone engaged in a mass shooting like took place in Jacksonville,” Pence tells CBS News’s Face The Nation.
Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts filed the “Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act” in the U.S. House of Representatives. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin is co-sponsoring the legislation.
Prison officials have moved a former drug dealer convicted of killing a 16-year-old Texas girl off federal death row years after a judge deemed him intellectually disabled and vacated his death sentence.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Terre Haute, asks a federal judge to allow clergy to have physical contact with the men for whom they serve as spiritual advisors.
While President Joe Biden’s Justice Department paused federal executions and reversed decisions to seek death sentences in some cases, it continues to seek them in others.
Death penalty opponents expected Biden to act within weeks of taking office to fulfill his 2020 campaign promise to end capital punishment on the federal level. Instead, Biden has taken no steps toward fulfilling that promise.
Defense lawyers argued that the life of someone who aspired to be a martyr should be spared, and he should be forced to finish his life in a high-security prison where someday he may realize the harm he did was wrong.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Houle told jurors that defendant Sayfullo Saipov, 35, “chose to violently smash and crush his victims, who were defenseless and included a child” with his Halloween day truck attack.
The lawyers said it seemed arbitrary for the U.S. Justice Department to “spare some defendants but single out Mr. Saipov, a Muslim immigrant, for the death penalty even though their culpability is arguably greater.”
An Islamic extremist who killed eight people with a speeding truck in a 2017 rampage on a popular New York City bike path was convicted Thursday of 28 federal crimes and could face the death penalty.
President Joe Biden campaigned on a pledge to work toward abolishing federal capital punishment but has taken no major steps to that end. The Justice Department continues to press for the death penalty in certain cases.
The U.S. Department of Justice disclosed the decision not to pursue capital punishment against Patrick Crusius in a one-sentence notice filed Tuesday with the federal court in El Paso.
A lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court accuses the bureau of holding 38 men in isolated conditions that constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
But Shane Meehan still faces a murder charge in the fatal shooting of detective and federal task force agent Greg Ferency outside an F.B.I. field office last summer.
The justices, by a 6-3 vote Friday, agreed with the Biden administration’s arguments that a federal appeals court was wrong to throw out the sentence of death a jury imposed on Tsarnaev for his role in the bombing.
A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond rejected arguments that the young white man should have been ruled incompetent to stand trial in the shootings at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.
