April 24 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump's administration plans to add firing squads, electrocution and gas asphyxiation as alternative methods of executing people convicted of the gravest federal crimes, it announced on Friday, noting difficulties in obtaining drugs for lethal injections.
The recommendation came in a Justice Department report fulfilling Trump's promise to resume capital punishment at the federal level in his second term, although it will likely be several years before another federal execution can be scheduled.
Shortly before his first term ended in 2021, Trump, a Republican, resumed executions at the federal level after a 20-year gap, putting 13 federal prisoners to death with lethal injections in his final few months in office. There had been just three federal executions in the preceding 50 years.
Most executions in the U.S. are carried out by state governments.
Returning to the White House last year, Trump rescinded a moratorium on federal executions by his predecessor, former President Joe Biden.
Trump's Justice Department is now seeking the death penalty against more than 40 defendants across the country, although none have yet gone to trial, each of which can take years.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, in his introduction to the 52-page report, wrote that the Biden administration's moratorium had "undermined the federal death penalty and left victims, their families, their communities, and the Nation to bear the consequences."
In the report, Blanche instructed the Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons to modify its execution protocol "to include additional, constitutional manners of execution that are currently provided for by the law of certain states," pointing to the older methods of firing squads and electrocution, and the new gas asphyxiation method pioneered by Alabama in 2024.
Adding alternative methods to the protocol will allow for executions "even if a specific drug is unavailable," the report said.METHODS ARE DAUNTING
It can take years for condemned prisoners to exhaust all legal avenues for challenging their death sentences, and none of the three men on federal death row are eligible, under current Justice Department rules, to be given execution datesActing Attorney General Todd Blanche, in his introduction to the 52-page report, wrote that the Biden administration's moratorium had "undermined the federal death penalty and left victims, their families, their communities, and the Nation to bear the consequences."Biden, a Democrat, commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 men awaiting executions on federal death row, leaving only three behind: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in 2015 for the deadly bombing of the Boston Marathon; Dylann Roof, convicted in 2017 of killing nine worshipers at a South Carolina church; and Robert Bowers, convicted in 2023 of killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The U.S. is one of very few Western nations that still uses the death penalty, although public support for capital punishment has gradually declined among Americans. According to long-running Gallup surveys, opens new tab, 52 percent said they supported it for murder last October, the lowest in more than 50 years, while 44 percent said they opposed it.
METHODS ARE DAUNTING
It can take years for condemned prisoners to exhaust all legal avenues for challenging their death sentences, and none of the three men on federal death row are eligible, under current Justice Department rules, to be given execution dates
Typically, when a U.S. state or the federal government adopts a new execution protocol, death row prisoners can mount legal challenges arguing the new method violates the U.S. Constitution's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishments."
Such challenges have always failed at the U.S. Supreme Court, which has never previously found an adopted execution method to be unconstitutional. However, some methods, including the firing squad and electrocution, have not been revisited by the court since the 19th century, and the court has not yet agreed to hear challenges to gas asphyxiation.
In 2024, Alabama became the first state to execute someone by forcing nitrogen into their airways through a face mask, suffocating them. This method has since been adopted by Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma.
Some opponents of executions criticized Trump for adopting these additional methods. Cassandra Stubbs, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Capital Punishment Project, said the Justice Department "embraces forms of execution that have been widely denounced for their cruelty and unnecessary infliction of extreme pain."
Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Additional reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones and
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