President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice has withdrawn the death penalty in at least a dozen cases, The Houston Chronicle has reported.

Officials familiar with the situation told the outlet that during Attorney Merrick Garland’s tenure, the DoJ has “issued a moratorium on federal executions and retracted the agency’s plans to pursue capital punishment in a dozen pending cases, including one in the Houston area.”

“These actions mark a significant policy shift, considering federal death row is home to less than four dozen prisoners,” added the Chronicle.

During President Trump’s final six months in office, Attorney General William Barr expedited a total of 13 executions after a near 20-year freeze, according to the BBC:

Since the federal death penalty was reinstated by the US Supreme Court in 1988, executions carried out by the national or federal government in the US have remained rare.

Before Mr Trump took office, only three federal executions had taken place in this period.

All were carried out under Republican President George W Bush, and included inmate Timothy McVeigh, convicted of the Oklahoma City federal building bombing. Since 2003, there have been no federal executions at all.

In March, as the Supreme Court announced it would review Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death penalty case, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that the president continues to have “grave concerns” about capital punishment.

“President Biden made clear, as he did on the campaign trail, that he has grave concerns about whether capital punishment, as currently implemented, is consistent with the values that are fundamental to our sense of justice and fairness. He’s also expressed his horror at the events of that day and … Tsarnaev’s actions,” Psaki said.

In a memo this past July, Merrick Garland said that he would be reviewing federal methods of lethal injections, citing “serious concerns” about the “death penalty across the country, including arbitrariness in its application, disparate impact on people of color and the troubling number of exonerations in capital and other serious cases.”

“Those weighty concerns deserve careful study and evaluation by lawmakers,” Garland said. “In the meantime, the department must take care to scrupulously maintain our commitment to fairness and humane treatment in the administration of existing federal laws governing capital sentences.”