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The Department of Justice of the Trump administration announced this Friday the reintroduction of the firing squad as a method of federal execution, along with the re-adoption of the lethal injection protocol used during the president's first term.
The announcement is part of a broader strategy to accelerate and toughen the implementation of the death penalty at the federal level, which includes streamlining internal processes to reduce the time between conviction and execution.
"Among the measures adopted is the re-adoption of the lethal injection protocol used during the first Trump administration, the expansion of the protocol to include additional methods of execution such as firing squads, and the streamlining of internal processes to expedite death penalty cases," notes the official statement from the Department of Justice.
The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, was the spokesperson for the announcement and strongly criticized the previous administration.
"The previous administration failed in its duty to protect the American people by refusing to pursue and apply the maximum penalty against the most dangerous criminals, including terrorists, child murderers, and law enforcement killers," he noted.
«Bajo el liderazgo del presidente Trump, el Departamento de Justicia vuelve a hacer cumplir la ley y a solidarizarse con las víctimas», añadió Blanche.
Since the beginning of Trump's second term, the Department of Justice has requested the death penalty for 44 defendants, and Blanche has authorized the execution in nine of those cases, including three members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang accused of murdering federal witnesses.
The immediate backdrop of this decision is the massive pardon that former President Joe Biden granted in December 2024, when he commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 inmates on federal death row, converting their sentences into life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Three men convicted of particularly grave crimes were excluded from the pardon: Robert Bowers, 52 years old, the perpetrator of the massacre at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 that left 11 dead; Dylann Roof, 30 years old, a white supremacist who took the lives of nine people at an African American church in Charleston; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 31 years old, one of the perpetrators of the bombing at the Boston Marathon in 2013, which resulted in three deaths and injured more than a dozen people.
During his first term, Trump had already resumed federal executions after a hiatus of nearly twenty years: between 2020 and 2021, the federal government executed 13 people at the Terre Haute penitentiary in Indiana.
The firing squad has experienced a resurgence in recent years at the state level, driven in part by the shortage of drugs for lethal injection: pharmaceutical companies refuse to sell them for corporate image reasons, and the European Union banned their export to the United States in 2011.
Five states currently allow this method: Idaho, Utah, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Mississippi. In March 2025, South Carolina executed Brad Sigmon, convicted of double murder, in the first execution of this kind in the country in 15 years.
Nationally, state executions reached their highest level in a decade in 2025, with 11 states carrying out the death penalty compared to nine in 2024 and five in 2023, and Florida as the clear leader with 16 executions that year.
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