The U.S. Justice Department said it will expand the range of methods the federal government can use to carry out death sentences, including firing squads, as the Trump administration seeks to speed up federal capital punishment cases after a Biden-era pause.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement that the Justice Department is “once again enforcing the law and standing with victims,” after what he described as a failure by the prior administration to pursue and carry out executions against “the most dangerous criminals.” Blanche specifically faulted the earlier approach for not pursuing “the ultimate punishment,” and he framed the department’s actions as part of a broader push to resume federal executions.
The department will adopt firing squads as a permitted execution method, according to officials who spoke as the administration moved to ramp up and expedite capital punishment. The Justice Department also said it is reauthorizing a lethal-injection protocol that relies on a single drug, pentobarbital, which was used to conduct executions during Trump’s first administration.
A previous federal protocol had used a three-drug mix for lethal injection during the era of the last federal executions prior to Trump’s first term, the Justice Department’s officials said. The shift to pentobarbital was adopted during Bill Barr’s tenure as attorney general.
The Biden administration had removed pentobarbital from the federal execution protocol after a government review raised concerns about the possibility of unnecessary pain and suffering. The AP report said Attorney General Merrick Garland withdrew the pentobarbital policy in the final days of the Biden administration, following findings in that review that there remains “significant uncertainty” about whether its use causes unnecessary pain and suffering.
Under the department’s reauthorization plan, officials also pointed to actions taken during the Barr era and earlier federal rule-making. In 2020, the Justice Department published a rule in the Federal Register that allowed federal executions by lethal injection or by “any other manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence was imposed,” AP reported.
The Justice Department actions were announced alongside other developments affecting how many death-penalty cases federal prosecutors are pursuing. AP reported that only three defendants remain on federal death row after Biden converted 37 sentences to life in prison, while the Trump administration had authorized seeking death sentences against 44 defendants.
The department’s pentobarbital-related actions and firing-squad adoption were part of a broader effort to restart federal executions after a moratorium ordered under Biden. The Justice Department also said it is reauthorizing the pentobarbital protocol that was used to carry out 13 executions during Trump’s first administration, which AP said was more than any other president in modern history.
The Biden administration’s decision to withdraw pentobarbital was tied to medical and scientific concerns, while the Justice Department’s new stance cited by AP said the prior administration “got the standard and the science wrong.” The AP report said the department’s Friday release argued the evidence was not properly addressed and said pentobarbital quickly “loses consciousness—rendering him unable to experience pain.”
Federal executions have not previously used firing squads as a method in the federal protocol, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. AP reported that five states currently authorize executions by firing squad—Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah—and that states also use other methods including electrocution and inhaling nitrogen gas.
On federal death row, AP said, are Dylann Roof, convicted for the 2015 racist killings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; and Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, in what AP described as the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.