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Illustration of an American prison cell.
The Trump administration is doubling down on the death penalty. The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Friday, April 24, a series of measures aimed at easing the use of capital punishment in federal cases, including expanding the authorized methods of execution beyond lethal injection.
These include the firing squad, electrocution, and lethal gas inhalation, methods in use in some states, though lethal injection remains the most common.
Since his return to the White House on January 20, 2025, Donald Trump had signed a decree ordering the mandatory imposition of the death penalty for the most serious crimes as well as for the murders of police officers or crimes committed by foreigners in irregular situations.
Executions in the country are mostly carried out by states rather than federal institutions.
The latest federal executions date back to the end of the Republican president’s first term. After a 17-year hiatus, 13 convicts were put to death between July 14, 2020, and January 16, 2021, just four days before the inauguration of his Democratic successor Joe Biden.
Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 federal death row inmates
The Justice Department announced in a statement on Friday “to resume its solemn duty to seek, obtain, and enforce legitimate death sentences.” “Under the leadership of President Trump, the Justice Department is once again enforcing the law and standing with the victims,” said acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, criticizing the Biden administration’s record on the matter.
The Biden administration had declared a moratorium on federal executions, which was reversed by Donald Trump.
In December 2024, towards the end of his term, Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 federal death row inmates, a decision demanded by human rights activists who feared a wave of executions under Donald Trump. As a result, three death row convicts were excluded from this clemency measure.
They are Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers on April 15, 2013, Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who murdered nine African Americans in a church in 2015, and Robert Bowers, responsible for an armed attack in a synagogue in 2018 that killed 11 people, the deadliest against Jews in U.S. history.
