The administration under U.S. President Donald Trump has unveiled plans to expand the methods available for federal executions, proposing alternatives such as firing squads, electrocution, and gas asphyxiation. This move arises from ongoing challenges in sourcing the necessary drugs for lethal injections.

This recommendation is part of a Justice Department report that aligns with Trump’s commitment to reinstate capital punishment at the federal level during his potential second term. However, it may take several years before another federal execution is scheduled.

At the conclusion of his first term in 2021, Trump, a Republican, reignited federal executions following a two-decade hiatus, resulting in the execution of 13 federal inmates via lethal injection in his final months in office. Prior to this, only three federal executions had occurred in the past half-century.

In the United States, the majority of executions are conducted by state governments.

Upon returning to the White House last year, Trump lifted the federal execution moratorium imposed by former President Joe Biden.

Currently, Trump’s Justice Department is pursuing the death penalty for over 40 defendants nationwide, though none have yet to reach trial, a process that can extend over several years.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, in his introduction to the 52-page report, wrote that the Biden administration’s moratorium had “undermined the federal death penalty and left victims, their families, their communities, and the Nation to bear the consequences”.

Reviving old methods, adding a new one

In the report, Blanche instructed the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons to modify its execution protocol “to include additional, constitutional manners of execution that are currently provided for by the law of certain states”, pointing to the older methods of firing squads and electrocution, and the new gas asphyxiation method pioneered by Alabama in 2024.

Adding alternative methods to the protocol will allow for executions “even if a specific drug is unavailable”, the report said.

Biden, a Democrat, commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 men awaiting executions on federal death row, leaving only three behind: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in 2015 for the deadly bombing of the Boston Marathon; Dylann Roof, convicted in 2017 of killing nine worshipers at a South Carolina church; and Robert Bowers, convicted in 2023 of killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The US is one of very few Western nations that still uses the death penalty, although public support for capital punishment has gradually declined among Americans. According to long-running Gallup surveys, 52 per cent said they supported it for murder last October, the lowest in more than 50 years, while 44 per cent said they opposed it.

Legal challenges to execution methods are daunting

It can take years for condemned prisoners to exhaust all legal avenues for challenging their death sentences, and none of the three men on federal death row are eligible, under current Justice Department rules, to be given execution dates.

Typically, when a US state or the federal government adopts a new execution protocol, death row prisoners can mount legal challenges arguing the new method violates the US Constitution’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments”.

Such challenges have always failed at the US Supreme Court, which has never previously found an adopted execution method to be unconstitutional. However, some methods, including the firing squad and electrocution, have not been revisited by the court since the 19th century, and the court has not yet agreed to hear challenges to gas asphyxiation.

Lethal injection remains the most common method in the US, but has a higher rate of being botched than other methods, including the single-drug protocol adopted by the federal government in 2019 using pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate.

Some executions have been aborted as prison officials struggled to find a vein on a strapped-down prisoner. Opponents of the method say autopsies of executed people’s lungs show they experienced torturous drowning before dying from the pentobarbital.

Pharmaceutical companies refuse to sell prison systems their drugs that can be used in executions, partly to comply with a European Union ban. US prisons have had to seek out smaller, less-regulated compounding pharmacies willing to brew copies of those drugs.

This has led to several US states reviving older methods in recent years. Five states have firing squads, with Idaho set to adopt it as its primary method in July, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit research group in Washington. Last year, South Carolina carried out the first execution by firing squad in the US in 15 years.

In 2024, Alabama became the first state to execute someone by forcing nitrogen into their airways through a face mask, suffocating them. This method has since been adopted by Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma.

Some opponents of executions criticised Trump for adopting these additional methods.

Cassandra Stubbs, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project, said the Justice Department “embraces forms of execution that have been widely denounced for their cruelty and unnecessary infliction of extreme pain”.

Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking member on the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, criticised the Justice Department in a statement that called the death penalty barbaric and “a cruel, immoral, and often discriminatory form of punishment”.

“State-sanctioned killing is not justice,” he said. “These actions will be remembered as a stain on our nation’s history.”

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