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U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration plans to add firing squads, electrocution and gas asphyxiation as alternative methods of executing people convicted of the gravest federal crimes, it announced on Friday, noting difficulties in obtaining drugs for lethal injections.
The recommendation came in a Justice Department report fulfilling Trump’s promise to resume capital punishment at the federal level in his second term. In his first term, which ended in 2021, he resumed it after a 20-year gap, executing 13 federal prisoners with lethal injections in his final few months in office.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who released the report, has authorized seeking death sentences against nine people after Trump rescinded a moratorium on federal executions by his predecessor, Joe Biden, the department said.
“Among the actions taken are readopting the lethal injection protocol utilized during the first Trump Administration, expanding the protocol to include additional manners of execution such as the firing squad, and streamlining internal processes to expedite death penalty cases,” it said in a statement.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice is once again enforcing the law and standing with victims,” Blanche said.
Reviving old methods, adding a new one
In the report, Blanche instructed the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons to modify its execution protocol “to include additional, constitutional manners of execution that are currently provided for by the law of certain states,” pointing to the older methods of firing squads and electrocution, and the new gas asphyxiation method pioneered by Alabama in 2024.
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“This modification will help ensure the Department is prepared to carry out lawful executions even if a specific drug is unavailable,” the report said.
Biden, a Democrat, commuted the sentences of 37 of the people awaiting executions on federal death row, leaving only three men, Robert Bowers who was found guilty of killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in a mass shooting in Pittsburg in 2018; Dylann Roof, who fatally shot nine people attending a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2016 and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who along with his brother, orchestrated the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured more than 260 others.
Legal challenges to execution methods are daunting
It can take many years for condemned prisoners to exhaust all legal avenues for challenging their death sentences, and none of the three men have yet received execution dates.
Typically, when a U.S. state or the federal government adopts a new execution protocol, death row prisoners can mount legal challenges arguing that the new protocol violates the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.”
Such challenges have always failed at the U.S. Supreme Court, which has never previously found an adopted execution method to be unconstitutional.
Lethal injection remains the most common method in the U.S., but has a higher rate of being botched than most other methods, including the single-drug protocol adopted by the federal government in 2019 using pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate. A few executions have been aborted as prison officials struggle to find a vein on a strapped-down prisoner. Opponents of the method say autopsies of executed people’s lungs show they experienced drowning before dying from the pentobarbital, which they argue amounts to a torturous death.
This has led to several U.S. states reviving older methods in recent years. Five states have firing squads, with Idaho set to adopt it as its primary method in July, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit research group in Washington.
Last year, South Carolina carried out the first execution by firing squad in the U.S. in 15 years after Brad Sigmon, convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend’s parents, chose the method, saying he feared the state’s alternatives of the electric chair or lethal injection would risk a slower and more torturous death.
In 2024, Alabama became the first state to execute someone by forcing nitrogen into their airways through a face mask, suffocating them, a method that has since been adopted by Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma.
Pharmaceutical companies refuse to sell their drugs that can be used in executions to prison systems, partly to comply with a European Union ban, forcing U.S. prisons to seek out smaller, less-regulated compounding pharmacies willing to brew copies of those drugs.
State and federal death penalty laws operate differently. Currently there are 27 U.S. states where the death penalty is implemented under state charges such as murder. Blanche’s recommendation would apply to those charged with federal crimes such as racketeering or terrorism.
Federal executions though applied in all 50 states are much more rare than state ones, whose prisons often hold thousands of death row inmates at once, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
The last person to be executed on federal death row was Dustin John Higgs via lethal injection in January 2021, for his role in the murder of three women in 1996.
