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The Justice Department is bringing back the use of firing squads and lethal injection using pentobarbital as it seeks to expedite and expand federal death penalty convictions and executions. No federal executions have been carried out since 2020, when the first Trump administration broke with over a decade of precedent and executed 13 people on death row. The second Trump administration is now pursuing the death penalty in dozens more cases across the country. Renowned anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean says Trump’s push to restart federal executions is entirely unsurprising. “His first instinct almost always seems to be demonize someone as an enemy and then kill them and destroy them.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

Death by firing squad. In its efforts to ramp up and expedite federal executions, the Justice Department announced Friday it’s reimplementing lethal injections and authorized the use of firing squads to kill condemned federal prisoners. It’s also planning to impose new restrictions on the ability of death row prisoners to seek clemency or pardons, along with a regulation designed to cut years off the federal appeals process for state death penalty cases. Five states already allow execution by firing squad: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah.

At the Vatican, Pope Leo reiterated the Catholic Church’s opposition to capital punishment in a prerecorded video shared with DePaul University to mark the 15th anniversary of Illinois’s abolition of the death penalty.

Palestinian Prisoners Live on Hope. Israel’s Death Penalty Aims to Destroy It.

POPE LEO XIV: We affirm that the dignity of the person is not lost even after various serious crimes are committed. Furthermore, effective systems of detention can be and have been developed that protect citizens, while at the same time do not completely deprive those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption. This is why Pope Francis and my recent predecessors repeatedly insisted that the common good can be safeguarded........

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