WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department will adopt firing squads as a permitted method of execution as the Trump administration moves to ramp up and expedite federal capital punishment cases, officials said Friday.
The department is also reauthorizing single-drug lethal injections with pentobarbital, the drug used in 13 executions during the first Trump administration — more federal executions than under any president in modern history. The Biden administration had removed pentobarbital from the federal protocol after concerns it might cause unnecessary pain and suffering.
The moves are part of a broader push to resume federal executions after a moratorium under President Biden. Only three defendants remain on federal death row after Biden converted 37 federal death sentences to life in prison, though the Trump administration has authorized seeking death sentences against 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. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice is once again enforcing the law and standing with victims.”
Federal execution protocols previously did not list firing squad as an option, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Five states currently allow executions by firing squad: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah.
The pentobarbital protocol was adopted under Attorney General Bill Barr during Trump’s first term to replace a three-drug mix used in the 2000s, the last time federal executions were carried out before that term. In the final days of the Biden administration, Attorney General Merrick Garland withdrew the pentobarbital policy after a government review found “significant uncertainty” about whether its use causes unnecessary pain and suffering.
In 2020, the Justice Department under Barr published a rule in the Federal Register allowing federal executions by lethal injection or “any other manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence was imposed.” Several states permit other methods such as electrocution, nitrogen hypoxia, or firing squad.
A report released Friday by the Trump administration criticized the Biden administration’s review, saying it “got the standard and the science wrong” and overlooked evidence that a person injected with pentobarbital “quickly loses consciousness—rendering him unable to experience pain.”
Notable inmates currently on federal death row include Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015; 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.