The Justice Department announced Friday that it is reinstating the firing squad as a method of federal execution, expanding lethal injection protocols, and fast tracking death penalty cases under the Trump administration. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche released the memo directing the Bureau of Prisons to add firing squad to its execution options, with electrocution and gas asphyxiation also deemed legally acceptable moving forward. Blanche has already authorized seeking death sentences against nine people since Trump rescinded the Biden era moratorium on federal executions.
The announcement delivers on a promise Trump made throughout his second campaign. During his first term he executed thirteen federal prisoners in his final six months in office, more than the previous ten administrations combined. Rolling Stone reported in 2023 that Trump privately floated bringing back firing squads, hangings, and even guillotines, and discussed creating a video campaign to celebrate the return of more brutal methods.
Now watch this. In 1989, Donald Trump took out full page newspaper ads in New York demanding the death penalty be reinstated. The target of those ads was five Black and Latino teenagers arrested in the Central Park jogger case. Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise were all convicted. All five were later exonerated by DNA evidence and the confession of the actual attacker. Trump has never apologized. He has never retracted the ads. And now the same man who called for their executions is running a Justice Department that wants to expand the methods available for killing people and make it harder for them to fight their sentences.
That last part is the one most outlets are missing. Buried in Friday’s policy document is a directive to publish a proposed rule that would prohibit capital inmates from submitting clemency petitions until their direct appeal and first collateral attack are final. DOJ is also moving to finalize a rule that would cut years off the federal habeas review process in state capital cases. Translation: fewer chances to prove you are innocent before they kill you.
That matters because we already know the system gets it wrong. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, at least 202 people have been exonerated from death row since 1973. Black Americans make up roughly thirteen percent of the US population and over forty percent of the people on death row. The research on prosecutorial misconduct, faulty forensic science, coerced confessions, and eyewitness misidentification has been clear for decades. The appeals process is often the only thing standing between an innocent person and a state killing.
The firing squad itself has its own problems. In March, a South Carolina man convicted of a double murder became the fourth person executed by firing squad since the 1970s. An autopsy from a recent firing squad execution suggested none of the bullets struck the man’s heart, prolonging his death. DOJ is citing the difficulty of obtaining lethal injection drugs as part of its justification for the expanded methods, which is a tell. Pharmaceutical companies stopped providing those drugs because they did not want to be in the execution business. The government’s response is not to reconsider executions. It is to find new ways to carry them out.
Five states currently allow firing squad under certain conditions: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah. With Friday’s announcement the federal government is now added to that list. DOJ also directed the Bureau of Prisons to examine relocating, expanding, or constructing new execution facilities to accommodate the additional methods.
The language in the DOJ release is familiar. Blanche described the changes as critical to deterring barbaric crimes, delivering justice for victims, and providing closure to surviving loved ones. The public safety frame has been used to justify capital punishment for decades. What the data shows is something else. States without the death penalty consistently have lower murder rates than states with it. The deterrent argument has never held up under study.
What Friday’s announcement does is send a message. The administration is telling the country that it wants to kill more people, faster, with fewer legal protections, using methods that sound more like 1876 than 2026. For Black America, which has borne the heaviest weight of the American death penalty from lynching through legal execution, the message is not subtle. It is the same message it has always been.
The Central Park Five know that message by heart.
