The Justice Department announced Friday that it will permit firing squads as a method of carrying out federal executions and will restore the single-drug lethal injection protocol that the Biden administration dismantled in its final days, a sweeping policy shift aimed at clearing the path for capital punishment after years of deliberate delay.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the moves as a direct repudiation of the prior administration's approach to the most severe criminals in federal custody. The changes mark the most significant expansion of federal execution protocols in decades, adding new methods and streamlining the bureaucratic machinery that has kept condemned killers and terrorists alive long past their sentencing dates.
The department directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to broaden execution protocols beyond lethal injection, the New York Post reported. Firing squads are now a permitted method. Pentobarbital, the drug used in all 13 federal executions during the first Trump administration, is back in the protocol after Attorney General Merrick Garland withdrew it in the closing days of the Biden presidency.
The Washington Times reported that the expansion also includes gas asphyxiation and electrocution. The Justice Department said the broader menu of methods is intended partly to prevent delays if a drug shortage or legal challenge blocks one option, a practical concern that has stalled state-level executions for years.
A DOJ memo laid out the rationale in plain terms:
"Today, the Department of Justice acted to restore its solemn duty to seek, obtain, and implement lawful capital sentences, clearing the way for the Department to carry out executions once death-sentenced inmates have exhausted their appeals."
The department is also streamlining internal processes to speed cases from sentencing to execution. Fox News reported that the DOJ is considering changes to accelerate federal habeas review in state capital cases and exploring expansion of federal death row capacity and execution facilities.
The policy reversal cannot be understood without the context of what the Biden administration did, and undid. During Biden's presidency, a moratorium halted all federal executions. His administration removed pentobarbital from the protocol over what it described as concerns about "the potential for unnecessary pain and suffering."
Then, in a move that drew sharp criticism from victims' families and law enforcement, Biden converted 37 of 40 federal death sentences to life in prison. That mass commutation left only three defendants on federal death row.
Those three are not obscure names. Dylann Roof murdered nine Black congregants at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev bombed the 2013 Boston Marathon. Robert Bowers fatally shot 11 worshipers at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. These are among the most notorious mass killers in recent American history, and under Biden, they sat on death row with no prospect of facing the sentence a jury imposed.
The question of when mercy becomes evasion is one the justice system continues to grapple with in high-profile cases. But commuting 37 death sentences in bulk, without individual public justification, looks less like mercy and more like ideology dressed as policy.
Alongside the protocol changes, the Trump administration released a report Friday that directly challenged the scientific basis of the Biden-era withdrawal of pentobarbital. The report said the prior administration's findings "got the standard and the science wrong" and "failed to address the overwhelming evidence" that a person injected with pentobarbital "quickly loses consciousness, rendering him unable to experience pain."
The Biden administration's own review had found "significant uncertainty" around the drug. But the new report treats that conclusion as a product of motivated reasoning rather than honest inquiry, an administration that opposed the death penalty on principle going looking for scientific cover to justify a predetermined outcome.
This matters because the pentobarbital protocol was not new or experimental. It was adopted during the first Trump term under Attorney General Bill Barr. Thirteen executions were carried out using it, more than under any president in modern history. The drug worked. The legal challenges failed. And then a new administration simply pulled it off the table.
The pattern is familiar in criminal justice debates: officials who oppose a policy on ideological grounds invoke procedural or scientific uncertainty to block it, then leave the underlying questions unresolved so the next administration has to start from scratch. The Trump DOJ's report is an attempt to close that loop.
The federal government has not previously included firing squads in its execution protocols, the Death Penalty Information Center noted. But the legal groundwork was laid years ago. In 2020, under Barr's leadership, the Justice Department published a rule in the Federal Register allowing the federal government to conduct executions by lethal injection or "any other manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence was imposed."
Five states currently allow executions by firing squad: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah. The 2020 rule effectively opened the door for the federal government to use those methods when a defendant was sentenced in one of those states. Friday's announcement walks through that door.
Just The News reported that the policy follows a January 2025 executive order from President Trump directing the Justice Department to prioritize seeking and promptly carrying out death sentences in appropriate cases. The department said the goal is to "deter the most barbaric crimes" and deliver justice for victims and their survivors.
The addition of firing squads will inevitably draw opposition from anti-death-penalty groups. But the method has a long legal and historical pedigree in the United States, and the Supreme Court has never ruled it unconstitutional. The practical argument is straightforward: if lethal injection drugs become unavailable, as they have in multiple states due to pharmaceutical company restrictions, executions should not grind to a halt simply because one method is temporarily blocked.
The protocol changes are only one piece of the administration's broader capital punishment push. The Trump administration has so far authorized seeking death sentences against 44 defendants. That number stands in stark contrast to the three inmates Biden left on death row after his mass commutation.
The Washington Examiner reported that the Justice Department is actively moving to revive and expand federal capital punishment through concrete policy changes, not just rhetoric. The department plans to speed up capital cases and expand death row capacity, signals that the 44 authorizations are the beginning, not the ceiling.
Blanche made the administration's position explicit in a statement:
"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. Under President Trump's leadership, the Department of Justice is once again enforcing the law and standing with victims."
The cases that qualify for federal capital punishment are not minor offenses. They involve terrorism, mass murder, the killing of law enforcement officers, and crimes against children. The victims in these cases, the families of the nine churchgoers in Charleston, the marathon spectators in Boston, the worshipers in Pittsburgh, have waited years for the sentences juries handed down to be carried out. Under Biden, they were told those sentences would never be fulfilled.
Serious criminal cases continue to test how far the justice system will go to hold violent offenders accountable. Recent state-level fights over judicial accountability in violent crime cases show that the public appetite for consequences has not faded, even as elite opinion has moved in the other direction.
Capital punishment has always divided Americans. But the debate under the Biden administration was not an honest one. The moratorium was never presented as a permanent policy change subject to democratic debate. It was an executive workaround. The commutations were issued in bulk. The scientific review that pulled pentobarbital was, according to the Trump administration's new report, built on flawed analysis that ignored the weight of the evidence.
The result was a system in which juries imposed death sentences, courts upheld them, and then the executive branch quietly ensured they would never be carried out. That is not abolition through democratic process. It is nullification through bureaucratic maneuvering.
The question of how the justice system handles its most severe sentences has shaped American law and politics for generations. What the Trump administration announced Friday is a reassertion of a basic principle: when a jury of citizens sentences a convicted killer to death, and the courts affirm that sentence, the executive branch has a duty to carry it out.
Meanwhile, cases across the country continue to raise hard questions about whether the system treats violent offenders with appropriate seriousness. From competency rulings that shield accused killers from trial to debates over charging decisions in the most horrific crimes, the public sees a justice system that too often finds reasons not to act.
The families of the dead deserve better than a government that imposes the ultimate sentence and then loses the will to follow through.
