During a rally held in support of Republican candidates ahead of the midterm elections in Alabama, President Donald Trump reiterated his administration's support for increasing the use of the death penalty as a punishment for serious offences.
"We will pass the death penalty for large-scale drug dealers, human traffickers, and anyone who kills a police officer", Trump told supporters in the southern Alabamian city of Mobile on Friday evening.
In the U.S. capital punishment is legally authorized in 27 states, including Alabama.
Trump's announcement on Friday came after Christa Pike, a woman who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Tennessee, was given two lethal injections at a prison in Nashville and survived.
Pike has been hospitalized, and her survival has prompted Tennessee's Republican Governor Bill Lee to order a review into the botched attempt to execute her and a pause to all executions in the state, which has not executed a woman in two centuries.
Responding to the Pike case, Trump said that it was an "interesting situation" and that an execution "shouldn't be very difficult", but told reporters that they would have "to speak to Tennessee about it".
Trump's support for the death penalty is no secret. Upon returning to office on January 20th 2025, he issued an executive order entitled "Restoring The Death Penalty", which restored the federal death penalty and demanded that the Attorney General "pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use".
That order specified that the death penalty should be enacted "regardless of other factors" if a law enforcement officer is murdered and if the person convicted of a capital crime is an illegal immigrant to the U.S.
The Trump administration has also expanded execution methods to include electrocution, firing squads and gas asphyxiation.
According to data from the Death Penalty Information Center, 47 prisoners were executed in 2025 and 29 have been executed so far this year in the U.S., an increase compared to previous President Joe Biden's tenure, during which annual executions never exceeded.
Research conducted by the Pew Research Center in July showed that two-thirds of Americans supported the death penalty for those convicted of murder.
However, that proportion tends to drop significantly when the defendants are convicted of other offences.
When Trump proposed extending capital punishment to drug dealers in 2018 to combat the opioid crisis, a contemporary Quinnipiac University poll found that 71% of Americans - and a majority of both Republican and Democrat voters - opposed the proposal. It is unclear whether public opinion has shifted on the issue since.
