Trump, Republican-led states move to expand death penalty, setting up major legal battles
President Donald Trump is a vocal champion of America’s death penalty, at times calling for the state killing of specific individuals and groups he finds beyond redemption. His administration and Republican-led states are now mounting a push to expand capital punishment, speed up executions and lower the bar for who can be sentenced to death.
Those efforts are drawing a wave of legal challenges and could force the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit — and possibly rewrite — decades of death penalty precedent.
Trump’s revival of the death penalty in the US
The death penalty has been in retreat for decades. Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C., have abolished capital punishment, and four additional states have effectively halted executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Before Trump’s second term, federal executions were on hold. In his final weeks in office, President Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners on federal death row, converting those sentences to life without parole.
Public support has also slipped. In 2024, just 53% of Americans supported the death penalty for convicted murderers, a precipitous drop from 80% in 1994, according to Gallup. Support among younger Americans fell even more sharply.
Trump and some Republican lawmakers are now trying to reverse this trajectory.
As president-elect, Trump vowed on Truth Social: “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. We will be a Nation of Law and Order again!”
The death penalty was a day-one priority. Within hours of his Jan. 20 swearing-in for a second term, Trump signed a sweeping executive order restarting federal executions and directing the Justice Department to help states obtain lethal injection drugs.
Trump has called for mandatory capital punishment of anyone convicted of killing a police officer, unauthorized immigrants convicted of capital offenses and everyone convicted of murder in Washington, D.C., as well as numerous named individuals. The Supreme Court has previously ruled that such mandatory sentencing schemes are unconstitutional because they bar individualized sentencing and the consideration of mitigating evidence.
Florida leads the nation in executions this year
On the state level, Florida is at the forefront of a death penalty resurgence, with a record-setting 17 executions so far in 2025, up from just one last year. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, R, has defended this pace as both just and effective. Death, he argued, is the “appropriate punishment for the worst offenders” and deters violent crime while bringing justice to victims.
Asked for further comment, DeSantis’ communications director Alex Lanfranconi told Straight Arrow News: “My advice to those who are seeking to avoid the death penalty in Florida would be to not murder people.”
Is murder required for a death sentence?
Everyone now on death row and everyone executed in America’s “modern era of the death penalty,” since 1976 when capital punishment was reinstated, has been a convicted murderer. Whether treason and espionage could also be punishable by death remains an unresolved legal question.
Rape, even of a child, without killing or intent to kill, is not punishable by death, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 2008 landmark case Kennedy v. Louisiana. In a 5-4 decision, the justices found that death sentences for nonhomicidal child rapists violate the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel or unusual punishment” clause. They reasoned that the ultimate punishment, death, does not fit the crime under the nation’s “evolving standards of decency.”
That bedrock proportionality ruling is now under direct attack.
Can Florida push the limits of death penalty law?
Seeking to overturn Kennedy, Florida passed a law in 2023 that allows death sentences for defendants found guilty of raping a child younger than 12 years old, even if there was no killing or intent to kill.
Earlier this month, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a vocal advocate of capital punishment, announced a “test case” of the law. He unveiled the grand jury indictment of Nathan Douglas Holmberg, a 36-year-old nanny and coach accused of raping several children ranging in age from 3 to 10 years old and videotaping the alleged assaults.
In a direct challenge to Kennedy and decades of precedent, Uthmeier said he will seek the death penalty against Holmberg under Florida’s new statute.
Other Republican-led states may soon follow Florida’s lead. In September, 15 state attorneys general co-signed a letter Uthmeier sent to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi urging her to support the execution of child rapists and back a direct challenge to Kennedy v. Louisiana.
Bondi has not laid out a detailed Supreme Court strategy. But she has lifted the moratorium on federal executions and pledged to seek the death penalty in appropriate cases.
Why do critics oppose the death penalty for rape without murder?
Critics say expanding the death penalty to rape cases is unnecessary and harmful, especially to victims.
“There is no doubt that the Holmberg allegations are horrific,” said Maria DeLiberato, legal and policy director for Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
Yet seeking the death penalty simply “guarantees years and years of extensive and expensive litigation, an ongoing infliction of trauma to living child victims and decades of uncertainty on appeal,” she told SAN.
She added that “oftentimes, the child sexual abuse victim knows his or her abuser — either in a familial role or family friend. This adds an extra layer of weight and guilt to a child victim if their loved one is executed.”
Even without the death penalty, Holmberg would face a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole if convicted, a punishment DeLiberato called sufficiently “harsh and hard.”
Is ‘intent to murder’ required for a death sentence?
The 27 states that still authorize capital punishment have different laws pertaining to the type of murders and surrounding circumstances that are death penalty eligible. Some states limit the death penalty to cases of premeditated murder. Other states allow death sentences for what’s known as “felony murder,” where the defendant causes a reasonably foreseeable but unplanned death while committing a dangerous felony such as robbery, kidnapping or rape.
In a pair of decisions from the 1980s, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that defendants do not need a specific “intent to kill” to receive a death sentence, but, at a minimum, they must have been a major participant in the underlying felony and acted with reckless indifference to human life.
Like the murder requirement, this culpability standard is now being challenged.
“There is a big push among conservative legal scholars to relax the ‘intent’ and ‘premeditation’ prongs of capital punishment law,” said Jeffrey Fagan, a criminal and constitutional law professor at Columbia Law School. “But that runs against centuries of death penalty law in the U.S.”
Will the Supreme Court overturn precedent?
Taken together, the Trump administration’s policies and directives, Florida’s child-rape test case and parallel efforts in other states are designed to invite Supreme Court review of who can be executed in America and for what crimes.
Critics argue that lawmakers and prosecutors have already gone beyond what the Constitution allows.
“Florida’s death penalty has become unrecognizable,” DeLiberato told SAN. “We have executed veterans, the mentally ill, the intellectually disabled and men without state court counsel.”
With a conservative Supreme Court that has shown less willingness to halt executions or narrow death penalty statutes than its predecessors, legal analysts say the justices might be ready to reexamine fundamental questions like: Must a death sentence be tied to murder? What level of intent or culpability does the death penalty require? And how far can capital punishment extend and still fit the country’s “evolving standards of decency”?
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
