The U.S. Department of Justice will add firing squads as a permitted method of execution and reauthorize single-drug lethal injections using pentobarbital, officials said Friday, part of an effort by the Trump administration to ramp up and expedite federal capital punishment cases.
Pentobarbital was used in 13 executions during Trump’s first term — more than under any president in modern history — but the Biden administration removed it from the federal protocol over concerns about potential unnecessary pain and suffering. The moves come after the Biden administration imposed a moratorium on federal executions; President Joe Biden converted 37 federal death sentences to life in prison, leaving only three defendants currently on federal death row, though the Trump administration has authorized seeking death sentences against 44 defendants.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement that “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,” adding, “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice is once again enforcing the law and standing with victims.”
The federal government has not previously included firing squad as an execution method in its protocols, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Five states — Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah — currently allow firing-squad executions. Other states authorize methods such as electrocution or nitrogen hypoxia.
The pentobarbital protocol was adopted under Attorney General Bill Barr in Trump’s first term to replace a three-drug mix used in the 2000s, when federal executions last occurred before that administration. 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.
A 2020 Justice Department rule under Barr allowed federal executions by lethal injection or “any other manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence was imposed.” In a new report released Friday, the current administration said the Biden team “got the standard and the science wrong,” asserting the earlier findings failed to address evidence that an inmate injected with pentobarbital quickly loses consciousness and is unable to experience pain.
Those still on federal death row include Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015; 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.