I have been writing this professional conduct column for over 10 years, with and without co-authors, discussing topics from the mundane to the philosophical. This month, my co-author is Lynn Nichols, who is beginning a new practice representing respondents before the Disciplinary Board, and whose experience as a former homicide prosecutor in the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office makes her well suited to join me in this column, exploring a question of the ethics and morality of recent Justice Department decisions relating to the death penalty.

In the past month, you may have missed two significant pieces of news relating to the death penalty. First, the Trump administration, with seven weeks left in power, has scheduled five executions, the last of which will take place on Jan. 15, 2021, five days before a new anti-death penalty administration is sworn in to power. See https://thehill.com/homenews/news/527579-five-federal-inmates-scheduled-for-execution-before-inauguration-day. The second piece of news is that, on Nov. 27, the DOJ issued a final rule that will become effective on Dec. 24, providing the government with greater flexibility to conduct federal executions in any "manner" as permitted by the law of the state where the sentence was imposed. This change in the DOJ's final rule would no longer require federal death penalty sentences to be carried out by lethal injection but instead would allow for executions by other methods such as poisonous gas, electrocution or firing squads.