Federal Death Row Scraps Lethal Injection Protocol
Just days before President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office, the Department of Justice has announced its decision to withdraw the federal government’s lethal injection protocol on the grounds that it causes unconstitutional suffering.
“Because it cannot be said with reasonable confidence that the current execution protocol ‘not only afford[s] the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States’ but ‘also treat[s] individuals [being executed] fairly and humanely,’ … that protocol should be rescinded, and not reinstated unless and until that uncertainty is resolved,” Attorney General Merrick Garland wrote in a Jan. 15 letter to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Garland initially began a review — which was completed this month — of the process in July 2021. That review took into account autopsies of inmates executed via one-drug pentobarbital execution protocols and found that those people experienced flash pulmonary edema, which feels akin to being waterboarded. It also found that the drug failed to properly anesthetize the executed person, so that they felt intense pain upon dying. During the last years of the last Trump presidency, 13 people were executed using such a method — what criminal justice reformers and defense attorneys that many of them still refer to as a historic “bloodbath.”
“The DOJ’s review has confirmed what medical experts have said for many years: pentobarbital causes excruciating pain when used to carry out executions,” says defense lawyer Shawn Nolan; 11 states currently use this method. “No jurisdiction, federal or state, should continue using this cruel, unconstitutional execution method. We also hope the federal government, as well as state authorities, take into the traumatic impact executions have on correctional staff.”
Currently, federal death row only houses three people — Robert Bowers, Dylann Roof, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — after President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 inmates right before Christmas. But the question becomes: what methods will the next Trump administration adopt going forward? In recent years, sources close to the next president say he’s considering bringing back the firing squad, hangings, and, potentially, group executions — despite public opinion of the death penalty being at an all-time nadir.
“The ‘killing spree,’ as you call it, is returning,” a Trump adviser tells Rolling Stone. “There’s a new sheriff in town, and he doesn’t think murderers and rapists should get off easy.”