Durbin Statement On DOJ Actions To Expand Use Of Federal Death Penalty, Reinstate Firing Squads And Flawed Lethal Injection Protocol

Durbin Statement On DOJ Actions To Expand Use Of Federal Death Penalty, Reinstate Firing Squads And Flawed Lethal Injection Protocol

CHICAGO - U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, today released the following statement after the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced actions to expand the use of the federal death penalty, including readopting firing squads and flawed lethal injection protocol:

"State-sanctioned killing is not justice. Today, DOJ is turning back the clock by strengthening the barbaric practice of the federal death penalty-a cruel, immoral, and often discriminatory form of punishment.

"These actions will be remembered as a stain on our nation's history."

Durbin has been an outspoken opponent of capital punishment and has supported the abolishment of the federal death penalty. Durbin leads the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act, bicameral legislation to prohibit the use of the death penalty at the federal level and require re-sentencing of those on death row.

In July 2020, the first Trump Administration ended a 17-year hiatus on federal executions when it executed Daniel Lewis Lee, and followed that with six more executions between July 16, 2020, and September 24, 2020. After his defeat at the polls in the November 2020 election, then-President Trump and political appointees at DOJ ramped up the pace of executions during the lame duck period of his presidency. In December 2020, Durbin led a letter to the DOJ Inspector General seeking an investigation of the frenzied and unprecedented "spree of federal executions during [President Trump's] lame-duck period."

On the first day of his second term, President Trump issued an executive order entitled "Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety," directing the Attorney General to pursue the death penalty wherever possible, and in February 2025, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi officially lifted the Biden Administration's moratorium on federal executions.

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