Trump administration to prioritise seeking death penalty, use firing squads

Those techniques, it explains, could include the use of a firing squad, a rare form of execution in the modern-day US.

Currently, only five states allow firing squads for executions: Idaho, South Carolina, Utah, Mississippi and Oklahoma. But the pace of such executions is picking up.

Last year, South Carolina authorised at least three people to die by gunfire, the first such executions in 15 years. Idaho, meanwhile, passed a bill to make firing squads a primary method of execution.

While capital punishment is legal in the US, its usage is highly controversial.

Last year, for instance, the autopsy of one of the men killed by firing squad suggests none of the bullets struck his heart, prolonging his death.

Critics of the policy also warn that capital punishment is disproportionately meted out against minorities and the underprivileged. They also note the rate of wrongful convictions in death penalty cases, arguing that once the sentence is administered, there is no going back.

The Death Penalty Information Center, an advocacy group, estimates that at least 202 people in the US have been exonerated since 1973 after receiving death sentences.

The Trump administration, however, has argued that capital punishment is a necessary penalty for severe crimes, and it described Friday’s steps to expand its use as a salve for grieving families.

“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.

Approximately 55 countries permit capital punishment, though there has a trend towards ending the practice.

Roughly 141 countries have abolished the death penalty, including all but one European nation, as well as the US’s neighbours, Mexico and Canada.

US policy, meanwhile, has swung between different extremes. In 2020, the first 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 would oversee a total of 13 executions.

But Biden had pledged on the campaign trail to end federal executions, and when he took office in January 2021, his administration announced a moratorium on the practice.

In December 2024, during the waning days of his presidency, Biden also commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 inmates on the federal government’s death row to life imprisonment.

In Friday’s statement, Blanche pledged that the Trump White House would seek to reverse Biden’s move.

“Justice had been thwarted,” Blanche said of the commutations. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice will do everything in its power to reverse these failures and restore justice.”