
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.