The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said Friday it is expanding federal execution protocols to include "additional manners of execution, such as the firing squad," while also directing the Bureau of Prisons to study whether federal death row should be relocated, expanded, or paired with a new execution facility. The department framed the move as part of a broader effort to "strengthen the federal death penalty."
The change follows President Donald Trump's 2025 order restoring the federal death penalty and comes after the Biden administration commuted 37 of 40 federal death sentences in December 2024. That left three men on federal death row: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, sentenced for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; Dylann Roof, sentenced for the 2015 racist massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; and Robert Bowers, sentenced for the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue mass shooting.
Federal executions have historically taken place at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, which the Bureau of Prisons designated as the federal execution site in the early 1990s. Male federal death row prisoners have been housed in Terre Haute, while women sentenced to death federally have been housed at FMC Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas.
The firing squad was not formally "abolished" at the federal level in the way some states abolished the death penalty. Rather, federal practice moved toward lethal injection, and a 2020 Trump-era DOJ rule broadened federal execution options to include methods authorized by the state where the sentence was imposed, including electrocution, gas or firing squad in some cases.
The Biden administration later paused federal executions and reviewed the protocols.
The DOJ's new report points directly to the drug problem. Reuters reported that the department cited difficulties obtaining lethal injection drugs as it recommended adding firing squads, electrocution, and gas asphyxiation as options in federal cases.
Supporters of the change argue that firing squads can be faster and less prone to botched procedures than lethal injection. Fordham Law professor Deborah Denno, a leading scholar on execution methods, has argued that the firing squad is more reliable than other methods because it uses trained shooters and produces a swift death.
That argument has even surfaced at the Supreme Court.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a 2017 dissent that there was "some reason to think" firing squads may be relatively quick and painless compared with lethal injection, which she called potentially "our most cruel experiment yet" in the search for a humane execution method.
But opponents say the debate over method misses the larger point. Cornell Law professor John Blume said in 2025 that allowing a prisoner to choose a firing squad over another method does not make the death penalty humane. "What's inhumane about the death penalty is that it kills someone," he said.
The return of firing squads is also part of a wider state-level shift. Lethal injection remains the most common method in the United States, but several death penalty states authorize alternatives, including electrocution, lethal gas, nitrogen hypoxia, and firing squads. The Death Penalty Information Center says lethal injection is still the most widely used method, though many states authorize other methods.
South Carolina carried out the first U.S. firing squad execution in 15 years in March 2025, when Brad Sigmon was executed after choosing that method over lethal injection and the electric chair. Idaho later became the first state to make the firing squad its primary execution method.
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