The Trump administration is bringing back federal executions.
Firing squad, lethal injection, electrocution, and lethal gas are all on the table.
During his first term, Donald Trump’s Attorney General William Barr moved aggressively to resume federal executions after he was sworn into office in 2019, and his efforts were successful. The first federal execution in 17 years occurred on July 14, 2020. The execution spree would end on January 16, 2021, just four days before Trump left office. Six of the executions took place during his lame-duck period.
Thanks to massive pressure campaigns from death penalty abolition groups, the Biden administration quickly instated a moratorium on federal executions, rescinded the federal lethal injection protocol and, on Biden’s last day in office, commuted the sentences of 37 men on federal death row.
All of that work is now unraveling under Trump’s second term.
One of Trump’s first actions upon taking office in January 2025 was to direct the Department of Justice to prioritize seeking death sentences and promptly carry them out.
With the exception of the headline-dominating story that the DOJ would seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, the administration hadn’t taken much action on the federal death penalty until this week.
On Friday, the DOJ announced that, among many things, it will be:
“Streamlining the process” for seeking death penalties
Cutting down the number of years between conviction and execution
Reinstating the lethal injection protocol
Directing the Federal Bureau of Prisons to include firing squad, electrocution, and lethal gas as execution method options
None of this is out of step with Trump’s campaign promises, though the inclusion of the firing squad, electrocution, and lethal gas as execution methods has stunned death penalty abolitionists worldwide.
What we know about the death penalty, through decades of case studies and research, is clear:
It does not deter crime.
The death penalty costs taxpayers more than a sentence of life in prison without parole.
Innocent people are too often sentenced to death.
People with intellectual disabilities are too often sentenced to death.
The death penalty is arbitrary, racist, and classist.
But if you read the report produced by the Trump administration that was released alongside the announcement on Friday, you would not know those facts.
The opening statement of the report from Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says that the death penalty is “an essential tool in a functioning criminal justice system” and that it “deters crime” – a statement that flies in the face of the federal government’s own findings that the death penalty does not deter crime.
I won’t sit here and pick apart the lies being peddled by the Trump administration as cover for them to oversee more state-sanctioned murders. We know that they’re lying. Worse yet, we can prove that they’re lying.
There is a strong sense of helplessness taking over the U.S. right now. Many of us do not know what to do to combat the relentless stream of chaos coming out of the White House.
The best we can do to fight the Trump administration’s plans to kick federal executions into high gear is simple: we must work to educate others about the realities of the death penalty. From the rates of wrongful executions to the routinely botched executions – it all matters and it will change minds.
Apart from educating others, we must seek to keep ourselves as informed as possible about what is happening with this administration.
As a person who reports the news every single day (for six years!) I have found myself overwhelmed to the point of burnout with news consumption. One tool that I cannot encourage people to utilize enough is Ground News. It is an app and a website that gathers over 50,000 news sources from all around the world and shows you the bias, factuality and ownership for each news source. Look at the above difference in coverage where the right is celebrating the news and the left-leaning sources are showing the barbaric nature of the executions.
There is no possible way I would be able to stay as updated as I am on the actions of the Trump administration if it were not for Ground News.
Get a 40% discount to their unlimited Vantage plan by going to groundnews.com/informed.
Remember: they are creating as much chaos as possible in order to burn us out to the point where we check out mentally and no longer pay attention to what they’re doing. Do not let them wear you down. The fight continues.
The death penalty needs to be abolished. We have plenty of reason not to trust the United States government in deciding who gets to die and who gets to live.
Just in time for their own demise. Then we can get rid of those things again