The administration of United States President Donald Trump has announced plans to expand the use of the federal death penalty, including through the deployment of firing squads.
The announcement on Friday was part of a policy document issued by the Department of Justice, setting out the legal argument for various methods of execution.
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It touted steps for “restoring and strengthening” the death penalty as integral to the pursuit of justice.
“The Department of Justice acted to restore its solemn duty to seek, obtain, and implement lawful capital sentences — clearing the way for the Department to carry out executions once death-sentenced inmates have exhausted their appeals,” the Justice Department said in a news release.
While the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution outlaws “cruel and unusual punishments”, the Justice Department maintains that execution by gunfire, electrocution and lethal gas are all legally acceptable.
The policy document also takes aim at Trump’s predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden, for implementing a moratorium on the federal executions.
“The federal death penalty has been rendered a dead letter, effectively transforming sub silentio each death sentence into a life sentence,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote in a statement.
“This changed when Donald Trump became President.”
Trump has long been an advocate for increasing the use of the death penalty, even before his presidency.
In 1989, for instance, he took out full-page advertisements after the brutal rape of a jogger in Central Park, calling to “bring back the death penalty”. The five teenagers who were arrested and convicted in the case were ultimately exonerated using DNA evidence.
More recently, in November of last year, Trump accused a group of Democratic lawmakers — all veterans of the armed services or the US intelligence community — of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH”. They had published a video online encouraging military members to refuse illegal orders.
In Friday’s policy document, the administration explained that it will return to using the drug pentobarbital for lethal injections, as it had during Trump’s first term.
It also dismissed a government assessment expressing uncertainty about whether pentobarbital, a neural depressant, “causes unnecessary pain and suffering” during executions.
The Biden administration, it added, “got the science wrong” in stopping use of the drug.
The report also calls on the Bureau of Prisons to consider expanding the federal death row and constructing an additional facility “to permit additional manners of execution”.
Those techniques, it explains, could include the use of a firing squad, a rare form of execution in the modern-day US.
Currently, only five states allow firing squads for executions: Idaho, South Carolina, Utah, Mississippi and Oklahoma. But the pace of such executions is picking up.
Last year, South Carolina authorised at least three people to die by gunfire, the first such executions in 15 years. Idaho, meanwhile, passed a bill to make firing squads a primary method of execution.
While capital punishment is legal in the US, its usage is highly controversial.
Last year, for instance, the autopsy of one of the men killed by firing squad suggests none of the bullets struck his heart, prolonging his death.
Critics of the policy also warn that capital punishment is disproportionately meted out against minorities and the underprivileged. They also note the rate of wrongful convictions in death penalty cases, arguing that once the sentence is administered, there is no going back.
The Death Penalty Information Center, an advocacy group, estimates that at least 202 people in the US have been exonerated since 1973 after receiving death sentences.
The Trump administration, however, has argued that capital punishment is a necessary penalty for severe crimes, and it described Friday’s steps to expand its use as a salve for grieving families.
“These steps are critical to deterring the most barbaric crimes, delivering justice for victims, and providing long-overdue closure to surviving loved ones,” the Justice Department said.
Approximately 55 countries permit capital punishment, though there has a trend towards ending the practice.
Roughly 141 countries have abolished the death penalty, including all but one European nation, as well as the US’s neighbours, Mexico and Canada.
US policy, meanwhile, has swung between different extremes. In 2020, the first Trump administration executed the first federal prisoner in nearly 17 years, ending an informal moratorium on the practice.
In the final months of his first term, Trump would oversee a total of 13 executions.
But Biden had pledged on the campaign trail to end federal executions, and when he took office in January 2021, his administration announced a moratorium on the practice.
In December 2024, during the waning days of his presidency, Biden also commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 inmates on the federal government’s death row to life imprisonment.
In Friday’s statement, Blanche pledged that the Trump White House would seek to reverse Biden’s move.
“Justice had been thwarted,” Blanche said of the commutations. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice will do everything in its power to reverse these failures and restore justice.”
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