WASHINGTON, D.C. — The administration of United States President Donald Trump announced plans to expand the use of the federal death penalty, including through the deployment of firing squads. The Department of Justice issued a policy document setting out the legal argument for various methods of execution.

The Justice Department maintains that execution by gunfire, electrocution and lethal gas are all legally acceptable. The Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution outlaws "cruel and unusual punishments." "These steps are critical to deterring the most barbaric crimes, delivering justice for victims, and providing long-overdue closure to surviving loved ones," the Justice Department said.

"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 Justice Department said in a news release. The report calls on the Federal Bureau of Prisons to consider expanding federal death row and constructing an additional facility to permit additional manners of execution, which could include the use of a firing squad.

The administration will return to using the drug pentobarbital for lethal injections, as it did during Trump's first term. The policy document dismissed a government assessment expressing uncertainty about whether pentobarbital causes unnecessary pain and suffering during executions, and criticized Joe Biden for implementing a moratorium on federal executions.

"The federal death penalty has been rendered a dead letter, effectively transforming sub silentio each death sentence into a life sentence. This changed when Donald Trump became President," Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote in a statement. "Justice had been thwarted. Under President Trump's leadership, the Department of Justice will do everything in its power to reverse these failures and restore justice," Blanche said.

In 2020, the Trump administration executed the first federal prisoner in nearly 17 years, ending an informal moratorium on the practice. In the final months of his first term, Trump oversaw a total of 13 federal executions. When Biden took office in January 2021, his administration announced a moratorium on federal executions. In December 2024, Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 inmates on the federal death row to life imprisonment.

Currently, only five states allow firing squads for executions: Idaho, South Carolina, Utah, Mississippi and Oklahoma. Last year, South Carolina authorized at least three people to die by gunfire, the first such executions in 15 years. An autopsy of one of the men killed by firing squad suggests none of the bullets struck his heart, prolonging his death. Idaho passed a bill to make firing squads a primary method of execution.

Approximately 55 countries permit capital punishment, while roughly 141 countries have abolished the death penalty, including all but one European nation—Belarus—as well as Mexico and Canada. The Death Penalty Information Center estimates that at least 202 people in the U.S. have been exonerated since 1973 after receiving death sentences.