The US federal government is to resume executing death-row inmates after a 16-year hiatus, the justice department has announced in a statement.
Mr Barr said the five had been convicted of murders or rapes of children or the elderly.
The executions have been scheduled for December 2019 and January 2020.
Mr Barr said in a statement: “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.”
There are 62 inmates on federal death row, but the last federal execution was in 2003. In a statement released on Thursday, Mr Barr said executions would resume with the deaths of five inmates “convicted of murdering, and in some cases torturing and raping, the most vulnerable in our society – children and the elderly”
