The Trump administration’s decision to authorize firing squads and accelerate federal executions is not a policy of justice — it is a performance of cruelty. It reveals a presidency so consumed by spectacle and retribution that it cannot distinguish between leadership and blood sport. The constitutional mechanisms to address this failure exist. The question is whether the Republic has the will to use them.
On Friday, April 24, 2026, the Department of Justice under President Donald Trump announced it would expand federal execution methods to include death by firing squad, reauthorize the use of pentobarbital lethal injections — a drug the Biden administration had suspended over documented pain-and-suffering concerns — and formally move to “streamline the process for seeking death sentences,” cutting the years between conviction and execution. It was not a policy rollout. It was a declaration of priorities. And those priorities tell us something deeply alarming about the fitness of the man issuing them.
The announcement came wrapped in the language of justice and victim advocacy. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declared that the prior administration had “failed in its duty to protect the American people by refusing to pursue and carry out the ultimate punishment.” The Department invoked terrorists, child murderers, and cop killers. What it did not invoke were the 202 death-row exonerations recorded by the Death Penalty Information Center since 1973 — real people, freed by evidence, who were nearly killed by a system the current president now wishes to accelerate.
1. What the Administration Actually Did
The policy document released Friday by Acting Attorney General Blanche directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to reinstate the pentobarbital lethal injection protocol from Trump’s first term, expand execution methods to include the firing squad, and examine relocating or expanding federal death row to accommodate new execution facilities. The DOJ also announced it would revise the Justice Manual to “streamline the process for seeking death sentences” and reduce the period between conviction and execution in both federal and state capital cases.
This is not a minor administrative adjustment. The federal government has never previously included the firing squad in its execution protocols, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Only five states — Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah — currently permit the method. South Carolina carried out three firing squad executions in 2025. In one case, an autopsy revealed that none of the bullets struck the inmate’s heart, prolonging his death. This is the model the Trump administration has chosen to nationalize.
The Death Penalty Information Center estimates at least 202 people have been exonerated after receiving death sentences since 1973. Expediting executions eliminates the time needed to surface this evidence.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center’s 2025 analysis, 75% of defendants against whom state prosecutors sought death sentences were people of color — a pattern the new policy does nothing to address.
Gallup polling shows support for the death penalty has fallen to its lowest level in more than 50 years — declining from 80% in 1994 to 52% in 2025 — per DPIC’s 2025 data. The administration is advancing an agenda most Americans are moving away from.
The Biden DOJ withdrew the pentobarbital protocol after a government review found “significant uncertainty” about whether its use causes unnecessary pain and suffering. The Trump DOJ simply declared the Biden administration “got the science wrong” — with no new scientific basis offered.
As reported by The Boston Globe and confirmed by the DPIC, the federal government has never executed a person by firing squad. This is an unprecedented expansion of state-sanctioned lethal violence.
The DOJ has authorized seeking death sentences against 44 defendants, with Acting AG Blanche having personally authorized nine, including three MS-13 members, per the DOJ’s own announcement.
2. A Pattern of Retribution, Not Governance
This announcement does not exist in isolation. It is part of a pattern — a presidency that has consistently prioritized punishment, spectacle, and the theater of toughness over the painstaking, unglamorous work of constitutional governance. Consider the timeline of events that led here:
“State-sanctioned killing is not justice. The death penalty is a cruel, immoral, and often discriminatory form of punishment.”
— Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ranking Member, Senate Judiciary Committee, April 24, 2026
3. The Civil Liberties and Racial Justice Catastrophe
Defenders of capital punishment often invoke the worst possible criminals — the Boston bomber, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, the church killer — cases designed to make moral objection feel like complicity. The Trump administration has done precisely this, centering its policy document on terrorists and murderers of children. It is a rhetorical trap, and we should name it for what it is.
The death penalty, as administered in the United States, is not a precise instrument of justice. It is a system riddled with documented racial bias, prosecutorial overreach, and irrevocable error. According to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Black and Hispanic people represent 31% of the U.S. population but account for 53% of death row inmates. The DPIC’s 2025 analysis found that 77% of people on federal death row are people of color. The administration is accelerating a system of execution that, by every empirical measure, disproportionately kills Black and brown Americans.
Cassandra Stubbs, Director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, put it plainly: the Justice Department under Trump “embraces forms of execution that have been widely denounced for their cruelty and unnecessary infliction of extreme pain,” as reported by Reuters. That is not partisan hyperbole. It is a factual description of what firing squads — and pentobarbital, when improperly administered — can do to a human body.
“The Justice Department embraces forms of execution that have been widely denounced for their cruelty and unnecessary infliction of extreme pain.”
— Cassandra Stubbs, Director, ACLU Capital Punishment Project, April 24, 2026
And there is the matter of wrongful convictions. Trump himself was directly implicated in this failure of justice in 1989, when he purchased full-page newspaper advertisements calling to “bring back the death penalty” following the Central Park Five case. Those five teenagers — all Black and Latino — were convicted. They were later fully exonerated by DNA evidence. The president has never apologized. He has instead spent his political career demanding more executions, faster.
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4. What This Reveals About Leadership
Competent executive leadership is defined not only by what a president chooses to do but by why, and by the quality of reasoning that underlies those choices. A president who dismisses peer-reviewed scientific uncertainty about a lethal drug with a four-word decree — “got the science wrong” — is not governing. A president who threatens sitting lawmakers with death for encouraging troops to follow the Constitution is not leading. A president who, in the same season he threatens to obliterate Iranian infrastructure on social media, moves to accelerate state killing at home is demonstrating a pattern that goes beyond ideology.
It is a pattern of impulsive, retributive, score-settling decision-making that is incompatible with the responsibilities of the American presidency. And it has not gone unnoticed — even among voices not historically aligned with the progressive critique of this administration. Tucker Carlson called Trump’s Easter Sunday Truth Social post about Iran “vile on every level” and urged Cabinet members to secure the nuclear codes. Candace Owens called the president “a genocidal lunatic.” Even Alex Jones asked on his broadcast, “How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” as documented in Rep. Raskin’s formal letter to the White House Physician.
When figures across the ideological spectrum — from progressive civil libertarians to MAGA media personalities — are raising the same constitutional alarm, the question is not whether there is a problem. The question is whether the institutions of American democracy will respond.
The Mechanism Exists. The Will Is the Question.
What the Amendment Does: Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution allows the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to declare in writing that the President “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” The Vice President then assumes those powers. If the President disputes this, Congress must decide the matter — a two-thirds vote in both chambers is required to sustain the removal.
Who Is Calling for It: Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced legislation in April 2026 to establish a formal Commission on Presidential Capacity, backed by 50 Democratic co-sponsors. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) stated that if he were a Cabinet member, he would spend his time “consulting with constitutional lawyers regarding the 25th Amendment,” calling the president’s conduct “completely, utterly unhinged.” Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has publicly urged the Cabinet to initiate proceedings, citing both mental fitness concerns and what he described as authoritarian threats to American cities. More than 70 Democratic lawmakers have collectively called for Trump’s removal.
The Constitutional Argument: Raskin’s formal letter to the White House Physician cited Trump’s “increasingly volatile, incoherent, and alarming public statements” regarding Iran — including a threat to destroy a sovereign nation’s power infrastructure on social media — as evidence that the president may be unable to discharge the duties of his office in a manner consistent with the constitutional requirement of reasoned, law-bound executive action. The accelerating normalization of firing squads, combined with Trump’s stated desire to execute political opponents and expedite the killing of convicts whose innocence may yet be proven, further establishes the executive branch’s departure from constitutional governance.
The Practical Barriers: The 25th Amendment has never been successfully invoked against a sitting president. Its Section 4 mechanism requires Cabinet members appointed by Trump and loyal to his political coalition to take action against him. Vice President JD Vance has shown no willingness to do so. In Congress, the Republican majority has actively dismissed calls for any accountability measure, with Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) calling the 25th Amendment push “TRUE madness.”
Why the Barriers Don’t Negate the Case: The Founders designed the 25th Amendment not as a political remedy but as a constitutional failsafe. The fact that a president’s own party will not use it does not mean the constitutional case for using it is wrong — it means the party has chosen loyalty over republic. The function of naming this option, insisting upon it, and demanding that Cabinet members answer for their inaction is itself a form of constitutional accountability. Silence in the face of documented executive incapacity is a choice. History will record it as such.
5. The International Isolation That Should Shame Us
The United States is now one of approximately 55 countries worldwide that still permit capital punishment, according to Al Jazeera. All but one European nation — Belarus — has abolished it. Both Canada and Mexico, America’s direct neighbors and treaty partners, have abolished it entirely. The global trend is unmistakable and overwhelming: 141 nations have ended state execution. The Trump administration is moving in the opposite direction, not just preserving a controversial practice but actively expanding and accelerating it.
This is not the posture of a nation confident in the justice of its institutions. It is the posture of a government that has concluded that the speed of punishment matters more than its accuracy — that the image of strength is worth more than the substance of justice. Sixteen people have been executed in the United States and later found to be likely innocent, according to the DPIC. An expedited timeline does not reduce that number. It increases it.
6. The Stakes Are Not Abstract
There are currently three men on federal death row: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted for the Boston Marathon bombing; Dylann Roof, convicted for murdering nine Black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston; and Robert Bowers, convicted for killing eleven worshippers at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. These are men convicted of monstrous crimes. None of them have exhausted their legal appeals. None of them are yet scheduled for execution.
But the administration has authorized seeking death sentences against 44 new defendants. That pipeline, accelerated by a streamlined review process that deliberately compresses the window for innocence to surface, will eventually fill with people who are not Dylann Roof. It will fill with people from the communities that the criminal justice system has, by documented evidence, historically treated as more expendable. It will fill with people whose lawyers were underfunded, whose juries were racially skewed, whose cases the system processed quickly because it has always processed certain lives quickly.
The administration is not building a mechanism to kill the worst among us more efficiently. It is building a mechanism to kill more people, faster, with fewer opportunities for error to be corrected. That is not justice. That is a body count dressed up as policy.
Editorial Conclusion
A president who weaponizes death — threatening lawmakers with execution, expanding firing squads, overriding scientific consensus, and accelerating the killing of people who may yet be proven innocent — has placed retribution above the rule of law. This is not a governing philosophy. It is the behavior of an executive unmoored from constitutional accountability. The 25th Amendment exists precisely for moments when the powers of the presidency are being discharged not in service of the Republic, but in service of a single man’s obsession with punishment and dominance. Cabinet members who know this and remain silent are complicit. Congress members who dismiss these calls as political theater are abdicating their oath. The democratic stakes could not be more clear: a nation that kills its citizens faster, with less scrutiny, under a leader whose own allies question his mental fitness, is not administering justice — it is institutionalizing cruelty. That must be named. And it must be stopped.
Sources & References
- U.S. Department of Justice — “The Justice Department Takes Actions to Strengthen the Federal Death Penalty”
- Al Jazeera — “Trump Administration to Prioritise Seeking Death Penalty, Use Firing Squads” (April 24, 2026)
- The Washington Post — “Trump Administration Seeks to Add Firing Squad to Federal Execution Methods” (April 24, 2026)
- The Boston Globe / Associated Press — “Justice Department to Allow Firing Squads for Executions” (April 24, 2026)
- NBC News — “DOJ Recommends Bringing Back Firing Squads in Federal Executions” (April 24, 2026)
- CNN — “Trump’s Justice Department Is Bringing Back Firing Squads for Federal Executions” (April 24, 2026)
- Reuters via Yahoo News — “Justice Department Readopts Firing Squads in US Federal Executions” (April 24, 2026)
- House Judiciary Committee Democrats — Rep. Raskin Letter Demanding Cognitive Evaluation of President Trump (April 10, 2026)
- NBC News — “Raskin Offers Bill Setting Up 25th Amendment Process to Remove Trump” (April 14, 2026)
- News Directory 3 — “Trump’s Mental Fitness and Calls for the 25th Amendment” (April 10, 2026)
- The Fulcrum — “Is Pritzker Right? Is It Time To Invoke the 25th Amendment Against Trump?” (October 2025)
- Death Penalty Information Center — Innocence and the Death Penalty (202 Exonerations)
- Death Penalty Information Center — “New Analysis of Racial Bias and Death Eligibility in 2025”
- Death Penalty Information Center — “What to Know: Race and the Death Penalty”
- National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers — “Race and the Death Penalty” (death row demographic data)
- Fox News — “Justice Department Announces It’s Readopting the Firing Squad as a Means of Execution” (April 24, 2026)
- NBC New York — “Justice Department to Allow Firing Squads for Executions in Move to Ramp Up Capital Punishment” (April 24, 2026)
- Rep. Raskin — Full Letter to White House Physician Captain Sean Barbabella re: 25th Amendment (April 10, 2026, PDF)
