Trump's administration has reinstated the government's power to order the death penalty for federal offenses after nearly two decades of suspension.

Five men on federal death row are now scheduled to be executed at the end of the year.

Attorney General William Barr said 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."

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The United States is one of a few Western countries in the world still employing the death penalty as a form of punishment for federal offenses. However, only 19 out of 50 states currently either allow the death penalty or have carried one out in the past 10 years.

The last person to be executed by the federal death penalty was Louis Jones Jnr, shortly before the sentence was suspended in 2003. 16 years later and President Trump's administration has just announced that it is bringing the federal death penalty back, and will start executing inmates on death row as soon as this year.

California's Death Row at San Quentin State Prison. Reuters/Stephen Lam

This announcement follows a broad assessment of capital punishment in 2014, enforced by previous president Obama. This order followed several botched state executions, particularly that of Clayton Lockett, the convicted murderer who took 43 minutes to die after being administered a lethal injection containing an untested cocktail of drugs.

Previously a three-drug method was used to execute convicted individuals. It entailed a barbiturate that acts as a sedative and painkiller, a neuromuscular blocking drug that prevents almost all of the body's muscles functioning and, finally, a lethal dose of potassium chloride, which stops the heart.

In the announcement, Justice Minister Barr said that, instead of the standard combination of three drugs, executioners will now be using a single drug called pentobarbital, which is already used in some states.

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This decision by the Trump administration has proven controversial and been met with considerable resistance.

Almost all of the Democratic Party's candidates oppose the death penalty — with the exception of the governor of Montana, Steve Bullock, who wants to continue to allow executions in particular cases such as terrorism.

Attorney General William Barr confirmed that executions will start taking place later this year using the single drug pentobarbital. AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

In a number of cases, death sentences have been re-examined following executions where people whose lives were taken were found not to have been guilty.

"The pervasive myth is that the federal death penalty is the 'gold standard' of capital punishment systems, applied only to the worst offenders," director of the Federal Capital Habeas Project Ruth Friedman told the Independent. "The federal death penalty is arbitrary, racially-biased, and rife with poor lawyering and junk science."

There are currently 61 people sentenced to death by federal courts, including the Boston Marathon bomber and a man who shot nine people in an African-American church in 2015.

Five executions have been scheduled for December 2019 and early 2020, according to the Justice Department. The first scheduled execution to take place under the reinstated federal death penalty will be the white supremacist and murderer Daniel Lewis Lee, on December 9, 2019.