The U.S. Attorney General has outlined when to use the death penalty on drug traffickers.
According to CNBC, Jeff Sessions issued a memo Wednesday that names drug-related crimes where the death penalty should be pursued.
On Monday, President Trump announced that he advocated the death penalty against certain drug dealers as a way to curb the opioid epidemic.
"I strongly encourage federal prosecutors to use these statutes, when appropriate," Sessions said, according to CNBC.
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Federal prosecutors were advised to pursue capital punishment as a sentence in both violent and non-violent cases, according to CNBC.
Some of those crimes include:
- Murder related to racketeering crimes
- Gun deaths that happen during drug trafficking
- Murder related to criminal enterprise
- Dealing in extremely large quantities of drugs, defined as distributing at least 600 times the amount of a given substance that would bring penalties of five to 40 years in prison
According to CNBC, the memo also proposed appointing an opioid coordinator in every U.S. district and expanding tools to analyze data for opioid fraud and abuse detection.
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