On Tuesday (Dec. 24), President-elect Donald Trump announced his intention to reinstate the death penalty following President Joe Biden’s decision to commute 37 sentences from execution to life imprisonment. “As soon as I am inaugurated, I will direct the Justice Department to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. He also criticized Biden’s clemency decision in a separate post, stating it “makes no sense.”

Biden’s irreversible commutations left only three individuals on federal death row, all of whom were convicted of mass shootings or terrorist attacks. These included Robert Bowers, responsible for killing 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2018; Dylann Roof, a white nationalist who murdered nine people at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who participated in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. As CNN revealed, over 2,000 individuals remain on state death rows nationwide, a realm over which the president holds no jurisdiction.

Trump’s campaign promises have consistently championed the death penalty as a deterrent to violent crime and trafficking. As REVOLT previously reported, he used his 2024 campaign launch to propose capital punishment for those he deemed worthy.

“I will ask Congress for a legislation ensuring that drug dealers and human traffickers — these are terrible, terrible, horrible people — who are responsible for death, carnage and crime all over our country; every drug dealer during his or her life, on average, will kill 500 people with the drugs they sell,” Trump declared during a speech at his Mar-a-Lago compound. “Not to mention, the destruction of families. We’re going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, is caught selling drugs, to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts because it’s the only way."

CNN added federal executions were exceedingly rare before Trump’s first term, with only three carried out between 1988 and 2019. While in office, his administration resumed federal executions under then-Attorney General William Barr. In 2020, the federal government executed 10 individuals — the highest number since 1896 and more than all state executions combined that year.