Trump's Death Penalty Executive Order Aims To Expand Execution

One of the executive orders issued by President Donald Trump amid the flurry of actions on his first day in office yesterday aims to reverse the long national decline in executions and provide federal support for states to carry out the death penalty.

In an executive order titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” Trump reversed a Biden-era moratorium on federal executions and instructed the attorney general to pursue capital sentences for every appropriate case—as well as in all cases of murder of law enforcement officers or murders committed by undocumented immigrants, regardless of circumstances.

Trump’s executive order not only will revive capital punishment at the federal level, but attempt to expand the death penalty by directly supplying drugs to states and overturning Supreme Court precedents limiting the death penalty to crimes involving murder.

The executive order instructs the attorney general to “take all necessary and lawful action to ensure that each state that allows capital punishment has a sufficient supply of drugs needed to carry out lethal injection.”

The death penalty has been in long-term decline nationally due to unrelenting legal challenges, governor-imposed moratoriums, and difficulties acquiring the drugs used in lethal injections.

Where the death penalty remains active, states have turned to extreme secrecy and novel methods to keep it going. They’ve passed new laws hiding their supply chains and methods, barred witnesses from execution chambers, imported drugs from shady overseas pharmacies, and paid cash to avoid paper trails. Despite all this, states haven’t been able to hide numerous botched executions that resulted.

In 2023 Democratic Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs paused executions in the state and hired a former federal magistrate judge to investigate its death penalty practices. However, Hobbs fired the investigator before he could release his report after he concluded that the sloppy injection protocols were not a viable method of execution. Arizona’s supply of lethal injection drugs is currently sitting in unmarked jars and are possibly expired.

Trump’s executive order will also add to a right-wing campaign to overturn current Supreme Court precedent outlawing the death penalty for crimes that do not involve murder. The order instructs the attorney general to “take all appropriate action to seek the overruling of Supreme Court precedents that limit the authority of State and Federal governments to impose capital punishment.”

In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Kennedy v. Louisiana that the Eighth Amendment bars capital punishment for the crime of child rape, affirming a 1977 decision that held the same for cases with adult victims.

Florida and Tennessee recently passed unconstitutional laws making child rape a capital crime in attempts to tee up an opportunity for the conservative majority on the Supreme Court to overturn Kennedy.

The Day 1 executive order is not a surprise. The first Trump administration embarked on an execution spree in its final six months, rushing through 13 federal executions.

“President Trump’s executive order demanding capital charges for the murder of law enforcement officers or capital crimes by illegal aliens is unnecessary bluster, because the death penalty already exists for such crimes,” Abraham Bonowitz, executive director of the death penalty abolition group Death Penalty Action, said in a press release. “But Trump can’t help himself. Donald Trump’s Agenda2025 articulated his plan to drastically increase executions, and we all know this is one promise he can’t wait to keep.”

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