Attorney General Pam Bondi issued last week several memos to all Department of Justice employees including one with the subject: “Reviving the Federal Death Penalty and Lifting the Moratorium on Federal Executions.” It detailed exactly how her agency will put into practice an executive order to restart federal executions that President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office.

The memo denounced the pause on federal executions under former President Joe Biden and claimed DOJ officials had neglected their jobs by upholding a moratorium on federal executions in place since 2021, which halted a killing spree launched by Trump in his first term. “The Department’s political leadership disregarded these important responsibilities and supplanted the will of the people with their own personal beliefs,” the memo read.

While there is no evidence that the death penalty achieves its purported goal to deter crime, the Trump administration wants the federal government to direct substantial resources and dollars to carrying out more executions, more quickly. Through its executive actions and policy memos, the administration is also stating something that criminal justice and human rights advocates have long said: that conditions in many federal detention facilities are inhumane, and Trump wants to keep them that way.

In the January 20 executive order, Trump directed his attorney general to evaluate the conditions of confinement for the 37 people commuted from federal death row at the end of Biden’s term and “take all lawful and appropriate action to ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.”

The message is a direction to the federal government to use conditions of confinement as additional punishment — which is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel........

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