US President Donald Trump Reinstates the Death Penalty
US President Donald Trump has resumed the use of the death penalty, having signed an executive order the day before, in which he instructed the Attorney General to provide states with a sufficient number of injections to carry out executions, AP reports.
Trump's new executive order obliges the Department of Justice not only to seek the death penalty in appropriate cases, but also to promote its preservation in states that have faced difficulties in providing sufficient drugs for lethal injections.
The US President also instructed the Attorney General to adhere to federal jurisdiction and seek the death penalty ‘regardless of other factors’ when it comes to the murder of a law enforcement officer or capital crimes ‘committed by an alien who is in this country illegally’.
Trump also instructed the Attorney General to seek to overturn Supreme Court decisions that ‘limit the power of state and federal governments to impose the death penalty’.
‘The government's most sacred duty is to protect its citizens from heinous acts, and my administration will not tolerate efforts to slow down and weaken the laws that authorise the death penalty against those who commit heinous acts of violence against American citizens,’ Trump said in his order.
In his campaign speech, Donald Trump promised to execute drug and human traffickers.
It was expected that he would resume executions at the federal level, which had been suspended since the moratorium was introduced by former Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2021, when the Trump administration carried out 13 executions in six months.
Currently, only three defendants remain on federal death row.