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.
