Washington– The Justice Department will adopt death squads as a permissible method of execution like the Trump administration It moves to intensify and accelerate Death penalty cases, officials said Friday.
The Department of Justice is also reauthorizing the use of single-drug lethal injections containing pentobarbital that were used 13 executions were carried out during the first Trump administration -More than any president in modern history. The Biden administration had removed pentobarbital from the federal protocol due to concerns about it The potential for unnecessary pain and suffering.
The moves were announced as part of a broader push to ramp up federal executions following a moratorium under the Biden administration. Only three defendants remain on federal death row after Democratic President Joe Biden 37 of their sentences were converted to life imprisonmentAlthough the Trump administration has so far allowed death sentences to be sought against 44 defendants.
“The previous administration failed in its duty to protect the American people by refusing to prosecute and enforce final punishment against the most dangerous criminals, including terrorists, child killers, and police killers,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice is once again enforcing the law and standing with victims.”
The federal government has not previously included the firing squad as a method of execution in its protocols, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Five states currently allow executions by firing squad: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah.
The pentobarbital protocol was approved by Bill Barr, the attorney general during Trump’s first term, to replace a three-drug cocktail used in the 2000s, the last time federal executions were carried out before Trump’s first term.
Attorney General Merrick Garland in the final days of the Biden administration withdrew the pentobarbital lethal injection policy after a government review of scientific and medical research found that there remained “significant uncertainty” about whether its use causes unnecessary pain and suffering.
In 2020, under Barr’s leadership, the Justice Department published a rule in the Federal Register to allow the federal government to carry out executions by lethal injection or use “any other method provided by the law of the state in which the sentence was imposed.”
A number of states allow other methods of execution, including electrocution, nitrogen gas inhalation, or execution by firing squad.
Trump administration, In a report issued FridayHe said the Biden administration “got the standard and the science wrong.” The report said the Biden administration’s findings, among other things, “failed to address the overwhelming evidence” that a person injected with pentobarbital “rapidly loses consciousness — rendering them incapable of feeling pain.”
Currently on death row is Dylann Roof, who carried out the execution The 2015 racist killings of nine black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; 2013 Boston Marathon bombing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Robert Bowers, who shot and killed 11 worshipers in Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018The deadliest anti-Semitic attack in US history.