Trump DOJ expands execution methods amid lethal injection shortages

The U.S. Justice Department has announced plans to expand federal execution methods to include firing squads, electrocution and gas asphyxiation, citing difficulties in obtaining drugs used for lethal injections.

The recommendation follows a broader push by President Donald Trump’s administration to resume federal executions during his second term and address supply issues affecting current protocols, Caliber.Az reports via foreign media.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the previous administration’s pause on executions had significant consequences, writing that it “undermined the federal death penalty and left victims, their families, their communities, and the Nation to bear ⁠the consequences.”

Blanche also directed the Bureau of Prisons to update execution procedures “to include additional, constitutional manners of execution that are currently provided for by the law of certain states,” pointing to methods already used or revived at state level.

The move has drawn strong criticism from opponents of capital punishment. Cassandra Stubbs of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project said the department “embraces forms of execution that have been widely denounced for their cruelty and unnecessary infliction of extreme pain.”

Senator Dick Durbin called the policy “a cruel, immoral, and often discriminatory form of punishment,” adding: “State-sanctioned killing is not justice,” he said. “These actions will be remembered as a stain on our nation's history.”