To begin the spree, 40-year-old Brandon Bernard is scheduled to be executed on Thursday, 10 December after being convicted in the 1999 kidnapping and murder of two youth ministers, Todd and Stacie Bagley.

Also, 56-year-old Alfred Bourgeois has been scheduled for execution on 11 December. He has been on death row for torturing and beating his two-year-old daughter to death.

Bernard and Bourgeois would be put to death at a penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana this week, according to the Justice Department.

The other three inmates scheduled for later dates are Lisa Montgomery – who will be the first woman to face execution in the US since 1953, followed by Cory Johnson and Dustin John Higgs.

Montgomery is scheduled for execution on 12 January 2021 for strangling a pregnant woman in Missouri before cutting out and kidnapping the baby in 2004.

The fourth inmate, Johnson, is bound to be executed on January 14, having been convicted for the murder of seven people, related to his involvement with the drug trade in Richmond, Virginia.

Higgs is the fifth inmate and has been scheduled to be executed on January 15. He was convicted in the 1996 kidnapping and murder of three young women in the Washington, DC area. Higgs did not kill any of his victims. His co-defendant Willis Haynes did, after being instructed to by Higgs.

Trump-appointed Attorney General, William Barr has said his justice department is simply upholding existing law, adding that the selected inmates had been convicted of murdering or molesting children and the elderly, Barr said.

However, Ngozi Ndulue, director of research at the non-partisan Death Penalty Information Center labelled the move extreme.

She said: “This is really outside the norm, in a pretty extreme way,” adding that “We’d have to go back to 1896 to find another year where there were 10 or more executions.”

Since the federal death penalty was reinstated by the US Supreme Court in 1988, federal executions in the US rarely happen.

Before Trump took office, only three federal executions had taken place since 1988, all carried out under Republican President George W Bush.

Since 2003, there have been no federal executions at all as multiple states in the US frown at the policy.

If the executions of Brandon Bernard and Alfred Bourgeois go ahead as scheduled, the 10 inmates executed in 2020 will bring a single-year total unmatched in modern history.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that Mr. Biden has pledged to eliminate the death penalty. His campaign promised to work to pass legislation to end capital punishment on the federal level and offer incentives to states to follow suit.