The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it was including the use of firing squads as an approved method to be used in carrying out the federal death penalty.
In a press release, the DOJ explained that the agency was taking several “actions” in order to “restore its solemn duty to seek, obtain, and implement lawful capital sentences.”
The actions taken by the DOJ included “readopting the lethal injection protocol utilized” during President Donald Trump’s first administration, and “expanding the protocol to include additional manners of execution such as the firing squad.”
“The prior administration failed in its duty to protect the American people by refusing to pursue and carry out the ultimate punishment against the most dangerous criminals, including terrorists, child murderers, and cop killers,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement.
Trump previously directed the DOJ “to prioritize seeking death sentences in appropriate cases” and to “promptly” carry out those sentences, according to the press release.
Under the Trump administration, the DOJ “has taken sustained action to implement that directive and reverse” the efforts of the DOJ, under the Biden administration, “to erode the death penalty.”
Per the press release, the DOJ under former President Joe Biden and former Attorney General Merrick Garland, “broke sharply from its longstanding approach to capital crimes.” The Biden DOJ also:
• Imposed an indefinite moratorium on executions based on a deeply flawed analysis asserting that the existing federal practice of execution by lethal injection with pentobarbital could not be carried out without risking “unnecessary pain and suffering.”
• Declined to seek the death penalty in many horrific cases, even where the career prosecutors and Biden’s own U.S. Attorneys recommended it, including cases involving child rapists and murderers; racially motivated mass shooters; and gangsters and drug dealers who murdered law enforcement officers, government witnesses, and informants.
• Abandoned capital prosecutions that prior Attorneys General had lawfully authorized and that federal prosecutors were actively litigating—against the wishes of victims’ families and career prosecutors.
• Urged President Biden to effectively empty federal death row by commuting the death sentences of 37 of 40 death-row inmates based on Attorney General Garland’s personal opposition to the death penalty without consulting all the victims’ families.
Under the Trump administration, the DOJ “has rescinded the Biden-Garland moratorium on federal executions and has authorized seeking death sentences against 44 defendants,” according to the press release.
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