What Donald Trump’s election could mean for the federal death penalty

Opponents of the death penalty are bracing for Donald Trump’s return to the White House, fearing it will herald a new round of federal executions in an echo of the final months of the president-elect’s first administration.

Opponents of the death penalty are bracing for Donald Trump’s return to the White House, fearing it will herald a new round of federal executions in an echo of the final months of the president-elect’s first administration. Many of those advocates – who say the death penalty is applied unevenly and unfairly, among other concerns – are now appealing to President Joe Biden to commute all remaining federal death sentences, thus leaving no federal prisoners awaiting execution when Trump takes office. Trump, during the 2024 campaign, indicated he would restart federal executions and work to expand the pool of crimes eligible for capital punishment under federal law, which generally allows for the death penalty in cases of murder, espionage and treason. The president-elect voiced support for imposing the death penalty on convicted human traffickers and drug dealers, while also saying he would seek to have prosecutors pursue the death penalty for migrants who kill American citizens or anyone who kills a law enforcement officer. While Trump has publicly distanced himself from Project 2025, the second-term roadmap written by his allies and members of his first administration similarly calls on the president-elect to “do everything possible to obtain finality” for those still on federal death row. It also wants the federal death penalty broadened to include people convicted of sexually abusing children, an application found by the US Supreme Court to be unconstitutional. Abolitionist groups, advocacy organizations and defense attorneys don’t doubt another Trump term will see more of the roughly 40 prisoners on federal death row executed, pointing to the 13 such punishments carried out in the months before Trump left office in early 2021 – the first at the federal level in nearly two decades.