The Donald Trump administration has announced that it plans to introduce firing squad, electrocution and gas asphyxiation as alternative methods of execution for people convicted of the most serious federal crimes, citing difficulties in procuring the drugs needed for lethal injections, reports Reuters.
The recommendation was included in a Justice Department report that makes good on Trump's promise to resume federal capital punishment in his second term, although it will likely be several years before another federal execution can be scheduled.
Shortly before the end of his first term in 2021, Trump resumed federal executions after a 20-year hiatus, sentencing 13 federal inmates to death by lethal injection in his final months in office. In the previous 50 years there had been only three federal executions.
Most executions in the US are carried out by state governments.
After returning to the White House last year, Trump repealed the moratorium on federal executions imposed by his predecessor, former President Joe Biden.
“Additional, constitutional, execution modalities”
Republican Trump's Justice Department is now seeking the death penalty for more than 40 defendants across the country, though none have yet gone to trial, with trials that could take years.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, in his introduction to the 52-page report, wrote that the Biden administration's moratorium “undermined the death penalty at the federal level and left victims, their families, their communities and the nation to bear the consequences.”
In the report, Blanche directed the Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons to amend its execution protocol “to include additional, constitutional methods of execution currently provided by certain state laws,” pointing to the older methods of firing squad and electrocution, as well as the new method of gas asphyxiation, first introduced by Alabama in 2024.
Adding alternative methods to the protocol will allow for executions “even if a particular drug is not available,” the report said.
Biden commuted the death penalty for dozens of convicts
Former Democratic President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 men awaiting federal execution.
The other three were Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in 2015 of the deadly Boston Marathon bombing, Dylann Roof, convicted in 2017 of killing nine worshipers in a church in South Carolina, and Robert Bowers, convicted in 2023 of killing 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The United States is one of very few Western nations that still uses the death penalty, although public support for capital punishment has gradually declined among Americans.
According to long-term Gallup polls, 52 percent of respondents last October said they supported the death penalty for murder, the lowest percentage in more than 50 years, while 44 percent said they were against it.
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