Welcome to Pushback. I'm Erin Mattec. President Trump is leaving office on a killing spree.

The federal government has executed 10 prisoners. That's the most in more than 120 years.

And there are still three more federal executions

slated for before Trump leaves office.

Well, joining me is George Hale.

He is a reporter who covers federal executions for NPR.

George, welcome to pushback.

Hey, thanks for being.

Thanks for having me.

You are based in Indiana where these federal executions take place.

Just give us a sense of what's been happening, this unprecedented amount of executions,

and how you've been covering them.

Yeah, sure.

So they actually started before I arrived in Indiana in January, or they were planned to start. But there was a sort of last minute court action, as tends to happen in federal executions, or any executions actually. And they were on hold for a while until finally this summer they started.

And a colleague of mine at the station, Adam Pinsker,

he was the one who had been set to cover them before.

And so when they actually started happening,

he ended up being the one to cover them.

What we didn't, of course, know, is that it was going to be this continuous, you know, to cover them. What we didn't, of course, know is that it was going to be this

continuous, you know, um, spree, like you said in the introduction, like an execution spree,

um, that was going to go on for the rest of the year. And so after, uh, Adam witnessed five people

killed in front of his face, his face five times in a row,

...