Federal officials announced Friday that the Justice Department will now permit executions by firing squad as the Trump administration works to expand and accelerate death penalty cases nationwide.
Officials also confirmed they are bringing back single-drug lethal injections using pentobarbital, the same method employed in 13 federal executions during Trump’s previous presidency — a record number for any modern president. The Biden administration had eliminated pentobarbital from federal execution procedures due to worries it might cause undue pain and suffering.
These policy changes represent part of a larger effort to increase federal executions following a pause during the Biden years. Just three individuals currently await execution on federal death row after President Biden commuted 37 death sentences to life imprisonment, while the current Trump administration has already approved seeking capital punishment for 44 defendants.
“The prior administration failed in its duty to protect the American people by refusing to pursue and carry out the ultimate punishment against the most dangerous criminals, including terrorists, child murderers, and cop killers,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice is once again enforcing the law and standing with victims.”
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, federal execution protocols have never before included firing squad as an option. Currently, five states permit this execution method: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah.
The pentobarbital procedure was originally implemented by Bill Barr, who served as attorney general during Trump’s first presidency, replacing a three-drug combination that had been used in the 2000s during the last federal executions prior to Trump’s initial term.
In the closing days of the Biden presidency, Attorney General Merrick Garland eliminated the pentobarbital injection policy following a government analysis of scientific and medical studies that revealed “significant uncertainty” about whether the drug causes unnecessary pain and suffering.
Under Barr’s direction in 2020, the Justice Department published Federal Register rules permitting federal executions through lethal injection or “any other manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence was imposed.”
Various states authorize alternative execution methods, including electric chair, nitrogen gas inhalation, and firing squad.
A report issued Friday by the Trump administration stated the Biden administration “got the standard and the science wrong.” The previous administration’s conclusions, the report argued, “failed to address the overwhelming evidence” that pentobarbital injection causes individuals to “quickly lose consciousness—rendering him unable to experience pain.”
The three remaining federal death row inmates include Dylann Roof, who committed the 2015 racially motivated murders of nine Black worshippers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who carried out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 in what became the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history.
