Justice Department adds firing squads, gas, electrocution for federal executions

The Justice Department reopened the federal death-penalty debate Friday by adding firing squads, gas asphyxiation and electrocution to its execution playbook, a sharp turn that reaches beyond lethal injection and signals a more aggressive posture under President Donald Trump.

The department said the change is meant to ensure executions can move forward even when lethal-injection drugs are unavailable. It is also readopting the lethal-injection protocol used during Trump’s first term and streamlining internal processes to expedite death-penalty cases, according to the department’s announcement. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the prior administration failed to protect the public and said the department is now “standing with victims.”

The move marks a direct reversal of the Biden administration’s approach. The Justice Department’s report said the previous administration imposed an indefinite moratorium on executions and commuted 37 of the 40 federal death sentences, leaving just three people on federal death row: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber; Robert Bowers, who killed 11 Jewish worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue; and Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston.

The federal government had not previously included firing squad in its execution protocol, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Five states now allow the method: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah. The expansion brings the federal system closer to the practices some states have revived, but it also reopens questions about whether older methods can survive legal scrutiny in an era still shaped by Eighth Amendment challenges over cruel and unusual punishment.

Those challenges are not theoretical. South Carolina’s firing-squad executions in 2025 drew scrutiny after lawyers said an autopsy suggested one execution may have been botched, underscoring how quickly a method cast as a solution to drug shortages can become a constitutional flashpoint. Indiana lawmakers also weighed the issue this year, but a bill to add firing squad as an execution method failed in the state House on January 28, 2026, by a vote of 48-47.

The Justice Department’s report said the Biden-era analysis concluded pentobarbital executions could create “unnecessary pain and suffering,” a finding Trump’s Justice Department rejected as a reason to keep the federal system restrained. By widening the list of approved methods, the department is not just changing procedure. It is sending a political signal that the federal government is prepared to revive capital punishment with fewer internal limits and a broader set of tools, even as litigation risks and constitutional fights loom.