The Justice Department has added firing squads as an approved federal execution method and reauthorized single‑drug lethal injections using pentobarbital, officials said Friday, part of an effort to revive and accelerate federal capital punishment cases.
Pentobarbital was the drug used in 13 federal executions during the first Trump administration, more federal executions than under any president in modern history. The Biden administration removed pentobarbital from the federal protocol after a review raised concerns that its use might cause unnecessary pain and suffering.
The moves follow a broader push to resume federal executions after a moratorium under President Biden. Since that moratorium, most federal death sentences were reduced: the Biden administration converted 37 federal death sentences to life in prison, leaving three defendants on federal death row. By contrast, the Trump administration authorized seeking death sentences against 44 defendants.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the prior administration failed to carry out the ultimate punishment against certain violent offenders and that the department under President Trump is again enforcing federal law and supporting victims. The department’s recent report criticized the Biden review, arguing it applied the wrong standards and overlooked evidence that pentobarbital quickly renders a person unconscious and therefore minimizes the potential for pain.
Federal execution protocols had not previously listed firing squad as an option. The Justice Department’s 2020 rule in the Federal Register allowed executions by lethal injection or “any other manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence was imposed,” and some states permit alternative methods such as electrocution, nitrogen hypoxia, or firing squad. Five states currently allow executions by firing squad: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah.
The pentobarbital protocol was adopted earlier under Attorney General Bill Barr to replace a three‑drug combination used in the 2000s, the last period when federal executions were carried out before that term. At the end of the Biden administration, Attorney General Merrick Garland withdrew the pentobarbital policy after a government review cited “significant uncertainty” about whether its use could cause unnecessary pain and suffering.
The department’s return to pentobarbital and the addition of firing squad as an option come as several high‑profile inmates remain on federal death row, including Dylann Roof, who killed nine members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber; and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.