US to add firing squad, electrocutions, gas asphyxiation to federal execution methods |
REUTERS — US 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, although it will likely be several years before another federal execution can be scheduled.
Shortly before his first term ended in 2021, Trump, a Republican, resumed executions at the federal level after a 20-year gap, putting 13 federal prisoners to death with lethal injections in his final few months in office. There had been just three federal executions in the preceding 50 years.
Most executions in the US are carried out by state governments.
Returning to the White House last year, Trump rescinded a moratorium on federal executions by his predecessor, former president Joe Biden.
Trump’s Justice Department is now seeking the death penalty against more than 40 defendants across the country, although none have yet gone to trial, each of which can take years.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, in his introduction to the 52-page report, wrote that the Biden administration’s moratorium had “undermined the federal death penalty and left victims, their families, their communities, and the Nation to bear the consequences.”
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.
Adding alternative methods to the protocol will........