DOJ directs the Federal Bureau of Prisons to expand federal execution protocol to include the firing squad

On April 24, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice announced — through a same-day press release from the Office of Public Affairs paired with the Office of Legal Policy report Restoring and Strengthening the Federal Death Penalty — that it had directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to take three administrative actions on the federal death penalty. First, BOP was directed to reinstate the pentobarbital lethal-injection protocol used during the first Trump administration. Second, BOP was directed to expand the federal execution protocol to include the firing squad and other manners of execution beyond lethal injection. Third, BOP was directed to consider relocating or expanding the existing federal death-row facility, or constructing an additional execution facility, to accommodate the added methods. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the actions; the underlying report's preparation had been directed by former Attorney General Pamela Bondi.

The DOJ report grounds the firing-squad expansion in Wilkerson v. Utah (1878), the Supreme Court's nineteenth-century decision holding that execution by shooting did not violate the Eighth Amendment. The Death Penalty Information Center's contemporaneous analysis notes that Wilkerson was decided under the long-superseded framers'-intent framework — not the "evolving standards of decency" framework that has governed every Eighth Amendment method-of-execution case decided by the Supreme Court since Trop v. Dulles (1958). The Court has never evaluated the constitutionality of the firing squad under the modern framework. The DPIC also notes that only five states currently authorize the firing squad, and that since 1977 fewer than one percent of U.S. executions have been carried out by that method.

This entry is recorded under corrections-abuse. The discrete event is the April 24, 2026 administrative directive to BOP — an action taken, not a proposal — that adds a method of execution to the federal protocol and authorizes facility planning to implement it. Two parallel acts surfaced in the same DOJ release on the same day are recorded as separate entries: the announcement of a forthcoming notice of proposed rulemaking to narrow federal habeas review of state capital convictions (issue-143-federal-ignoring-habeas, the trimmed sibling that retains the habeas focus matching its slug) and the announcement of a forthcoming rule barring federal capital inmates from filing clemency petitions until direct appeals and first collateral attack are final (issue-258-federal-narrowing-civil-rights-protections). The shift between announcement and final-rule promulgation will be archived as separate events when the rules are filed and finalized.