The Trump administration said on Friday that it would allow firing squads and readopt lethal injection as part of a broader push to revive the death penalty.
The moves come after President Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in the White House to renew capital punishment in the federal prison system. During the first Trump presidency, 13 people were executed in the federal prison system.
In 2021, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland issued a moratorium on executions of federal inmates and banned the use of a lethal drug protocol using pentobarbital. In his final days in office, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 convicted killers on federal death row.
In a report issued Friday, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said that those Biden-era decisions “inflicted untold damage on victims of crime, and, ultimately, to the rule of law itself.”
The department, he said, had reauthorized the use of pentobarbital to execute federal inmates. The Justice Department would also allow the use of firing squads and additional methods of execution.
The report the department issued as part of the announcement said the Bureau of Prisons should follow the example of states that had expanded their execution protocols amid fights over the legality and availability of lethal injection drugs.
“The additional manners of execution that B.O.P. should consider adopting include the firing squad, electrocution and lethal gas — each of which the Supreme Court has found to be consistent with the Eighth Amendment,” the report said, referring to the part of the Bill of Rights which bars “cruel and unusual punishment.”
The administration said it was also working on a regulation intended to cut years off the federal appeals process for state death penalty cases, though ultimately the courts have final say over the length of the proceedings.
The department also said it planned a regulation that would impose new limits on the ability of inmates sentenced to death to seek clemency or pardons from the federal government.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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