The U.S. Department of Justice’s decision to allow firing squad executions for federal death row inmates won’t immediately — or possibly, ever — affect Texas, but the move is drawing renewed attention from death penalty opponents in a state that carries out more executions than any other.
While Texas law does not permit firing squads, the federal shift highlights a broader national conversation about alternative execution methods as states face ongoing challenges with lethal injection, such as drug availability and concerns about complications that lead to a prolonged death. Any change in Texas would require legislative action and could face significant legal hurdles.
Tiara Cooper, director of In Defense of Black Lives, said she’s not shocked by anything that the Trump administration does and noted that cities and states have recently seen their leaders change local policies under pressure or threats from the federal government, including revising immigration policies.
“It’s clear that we’re under an authoritarian regime,” she said. “The death penalty is already extreme. Firing squads are just barbaric. Are we going to go back to the noose, to lynching, to stoning? We are going so far backwards as a people and as a country.”
Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty executive director Kristin Houlé Cuellar has said that her organization is opposed to capital punishment in any form because it is irreversible, arbitrary, and racially biased, and it risks executing innocent people. The Coalition cites high costs, inadequate legal representation, and the disproportionate application against vulnerable individuals, arguing that it does not effectively deter crime.
Those arguments remain the same no matter the method of execution, Cuellar said. One hundred sixty-seven men and women are awaiting execution in Texas, including 62 who were convicted in Harris County.
“The arbitrariness of capital punishment and the persistent problem of wrongful convictions should compel Texans to abandon the death penalty altogether,” Cuellar said.
Texas advocates were working Monday on last-minute pleas for a stay of execution for James Broadnax, who was convicted in the 2008 Dallas slaying of two men outside a music studio. The condemned man’s supporters say that recently tested DNA evidence corroborates a confession from Broadnax’s cousin, Demarius Cummings, that Cummings was the sole shooter. Broadnax is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Thursday in Huntsville.
If a stay is not granted, Broadnax will be the third man executed in Texas this year. Charles Victor Thompson of Harris County died by lethal injection on January 28, and Cedrick Ricks of Tarrant County was executed on March 11.
“The governor can still grant a stay,” said Cooper, who spent Monday morning with Broadnax’s family. “There’s still hope. We will fight until the final minute.”
Texas consistently leads the nation in executions, with 598 people executed since 1982. The No. 2 state is Oklahoma, with 192 people executed during the same time frame.
Firing squad executions at the state level are allowed in Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah. For Texas to join those ranks, a bill would have to be passed through both chambers of the state legislature, which won’t convene until next year. Texas executed by hanging pre-1923 and used the electric chair from 1923 to 1964. There weren’t any Texas executions for several years, and then capital punishment was ruled cruel and unusual punishment in 1972, causing a nationwide pause. Since Texas resumed the practice in 1982, lethal injection has been the only legal method in the Lone Star State.
No Texas lawmaker has ever introduced a bill to implement firing squad executions, and Cooper says she doesn’t anticipate such legislation coming forward. Such a change would almost certainly be challenged in court and would require new detailed procedures from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The state agency would also have to train personnel and set rules for when the method can be used.
In Utah and Oklahoma, firing squads are permitted but only if lethal injection drugs are not available. South Carolina allows inmates to choose the firing squad as an alternative. Some experts have argued that firing squads may be more reliable than lethal injection. Dr. James Williams, a Texas emergency room physician who has testified in death penalty cases, has said the method can result in near-instant loss of consciousness, compared with injections that can take longer or fail.
Texas prisoners sued the state in 2023, claiming that Texas intended to use expired drugs, violating state pharmacology laws. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ultimately blocked a lower court from halting the plaintiffs’ executions. Another lawsuit in 2011 argued that the decision to use pentobarbital in executions was made hastily without public input.
Texas and other states were forced to find a substitute for sodium thiopental when the only American producer of it, Illinois-based Hospira Inc., announced it would stop selling the drug. Hospira had planned to manufacture the drug in Italy, but authorities in that country wanted a guarantee that the drug would not be used in executions, according to the Texas Tribune.
Anti-death penalty advocates have argued that all methods of execution constitute cruel and unusual punishment. The U.S. Supreme Court has not struck down any execution method.
The April 2025 firing squad execution of Mikal Mahdi in South Carolina created controversy after autopsy reports suggested the shots missed his heart, causing potential prolonged suffering. The state’s Department of Corrections maintained that the procedure was successful.
About a month prior, Brad Sigmon of South Carolina was the first U.S. prisoner to be executed by firing squad in more than 15 years. A detailed report from PBS News states that Sigmon chose the firing squad over lethal injection or the electric chair, and the execution was carried out by three prison employees with rifles.
“Sigmon wore a black jumpsuit with a hood over his head and a white target with a red bullseye over his chest,” according to PBS. “The armed prison employees stood 15 feet from where he sat in the state’s death chamber — the same distance as the backboard is from the free-throw line on a basketball court. Visible in the same small room was the state’s unused electric chair. The gurney used to carry out lethal injections had been rolled away.”
The shooters all fired at the same time through openings in a wall and were not visible to about a dozen witnesses in a room separated from the chamber by bullet-resistant glass, according to the report.
“Sigmon made several heavy breaths during the two minutes that elapsed from when the hood was placed to the shots being fired. His arms briefly tensed when he was shot, and the target was blasted off his chest. He appeared to give another breath or two with a red stain on his chest, and small amounts of tissue could be seen from the wound during those breaths. A doctor came out about a minute later and examined Sigmon for 90 seconds before declaring him dead.”
Three men are currently on federal death row. Dylann Roof was convicted of carrying out the 2015 racist slayings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber, is also facing execution. The third is Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.
According to Legal Clarity, members of a firing squad are usually law enforcement or military personnel. In some cases, one rifle may contain a blank round so no shooter knows who fired the fatal shot, an effort to reduce the psychological burden on the participants. It does not appear that proponents of firing squad executions are concerned about the psychological burden on the witnesses, including family members of those being executed, Cooper said.
“The community cares,” she said. “The advocates care, but does the government care? Absolutely not. The government doesn’t even honestly care about the victim’s family. The government does not care about that level of accountability for the harm that it’s creating.”
The Associated Press reported last week that the DOJ’s announcement of adopting firing squads as a permitted method for federal executions is part of an initiative by the Trump administration to “ramp up and expedite capital punishment cases.”
The Justice Department is also reauthorizing the use of single-drug lethal injections with pentobarbital that were used to carry out 13 federal executions during the first Trump administration. Joe Biden’s administration had removed pentobarbital, the same drug used in Texas executions, from the federal protocol over concerns about unnecessary pain and suffering.
Biden, who served between Trump’s first term and the current one, converted 37 federal death sentences to life in prison. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement last week that the Biden administration “failed in its duty to protect the American people by refusing to pursue and carry out the ultimate punishment against the most dangerous criminals, including terrorists, child murderers and cop killers.”
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice is once again enforcing the law and standing with victims,” Blanche said.
Cooper said there’s simply no humane method of execution but she thinks the firing squad is “definitely extreme.”
“Will it come to Texas?” she said. “It is Texas, but I think that Texas tries to make itself believe that it’s operating with some level of decorum. That isn’t something I can foresee but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible.”
