The Justice Department is set to introduce firing squads as an approved method of execution, marking a significant shift as the Trump administration intensifies efforts to accelerate capital punishment cases, officials revealed on Friday.
Additionally, the Justice Department plans to reinstate the single-drug lethal injections using pentobarbital. This method was previously employed to execute 13 individuals during Trump’s initial term, a record number for any modern presidency. Previously, the Biden administration had removed pentobarbital from the federal execution protocol, citing concerns over the potential for causing unnecessary pain and suffering.
These decisions are part of a larger initiative to resume federal executions, following a halt during the Biden administration. While only three inmates remain on federal death row, President Biden had commuted the sentences of 37 to life imprisonment. However, the Trump administration has already authorized the pursuit of death sentences for 44 defendants.
“The previous administration neglected its responsibility to protect American citizens by failing to seek and execute the ultimate punishment for the most dangerous criminals, including terrorists, child murderers, and police killers,” stated Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice is once again upholding the law and supporting victims.”
Until now, the federal government had not included firing squads in its execution methods, as noted by the Death Penalty Information Center. Currently, five states—Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah—permit executions by firing squad.
The use of pentobarbital was initially adopted by Bill Barr, who served as attorney general during Trump’s first term. This method replaced a three-drug combination previously used in the 2000s, the last period of federal executions before Trump’s tenure.
Attorney General Merrick Garland in the final days of the Biden administration withdrew the pentobarbital lethal injection policy after a government review of scientific and medical research found there remains “significant uncertainty” about whether its use causes unnecessary pain and suffering.”
In 2020, under Barr’s leadership, the Justice Department published a rule in the Federal Register to allow the federal government to conduct executions by lethal injection or use “any other manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence was imposed.”
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A number of states allow other methods of execution, including electrocution, inhaling nitrogen gas or death by firing squad.
The Trump administration, in a report released Friday, said the Biden administration “got the standard and the science wrong.” The Biden administration’s findings, among other things, “failed to address the overwhelming evidence” that an injected with pentobarbital quickly “quickly loses consciousness—rendering him unable to experience pain,” the report said.
Currently on death row are are Dylann Roof, who carried out the 2015 racist slayings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S history.
