President-elect Donald Trump has promised to lift the moratorium on federal executions and put 40 people on federal death row when the Biden-Harris administration returns to power next year.
The U.S. government has executed 50 inmates since 1927, including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Cold War spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, according to the Bureau of Prisons. This is far fewer than each state that has executed more than 1,500 death row inmates over the past 50 years.
The government executed 13 federal prisoners during President Trump's first term, the most under any president in the past 100 years. President Biden then declared a moratorium on federal executions after taking office in 2021.
Below are some of the death row inmates being held in U.S. prisons.
Boston Marathon bombing case sent back to lower court
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
The surviving Boston Marathon bomber planted explosives at the running event on April 15, 2013, along with his brother Tamerlan. Three people were killed, including an eight-year-old child, and hundreds more were injured. He then killed an MIT police officer named Sean Collier as he tried to escape.
In this 2013 surveillance image released by the U.S. Department of Justice on April 22, 2015, convicted Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev gestures toward a surveillance camera in a detention center. (Distributed via USDOJ/Reuters)
Police shot and killed Tamerlan on April 18, 2013, and arrested Dzhokhar the next day after finding him hiding in a trailer boat.
He has not yet exhausted his appeals, and in March a federal appeals court sent his case to a lower court to examine juror bias.
His death sentence was thrown out by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in 2020, but later reinstated by the Supreme Court.
Tsarnaev, 31, is currently being held at Florence, a maximum-security US prison in Colorado.
Supreme Court rejects appeal of Dylann Roof, sentenced to death for murder at black church in South Carolina
dylan roof
In 2015, a white supremacist stormed into Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina and opened fire, killing nine black parishioners attending a Bible study.
The jury found him guilty on all counts in less than two hours.
On June 18, 2015, police brought suspect gunman Dylann Roof to court in Shelby, North Carolina. (Reuters/Jason Micek)
Roof was first sentenced to death for a federal hate crime in 2017, but his appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected in 2022. A lower court upheld his conviction the year before.
The 30-year-old is currently being held at a U.S. prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Philadelphia drug lord charged with more than a dozen murders
brandon council
Council spent a week at a motel across the street from Crescom Bank in Conway, South Carolina, where he watched the movie “Get Rich or Die Tryin'” before entering with a gun and working there for 36 years. Killed two women. An elderly teller named Kathryn Davis Skene and 59-year-old Donna Major, a bank manager.
A Sept. 12, 2017, booking photo from the Florence County Jail shows Brandon Council. (Florence County Detention Center, via AP)
FBI agent says bank robbery suspect confessed to intending to kill
Council, who already had a prior felony conviction at the time, told FBI agents that he entered the bank knowing he would kill someone during the robbery.
He had been on parole for a month at the time of the murder, which occurred during his second bank robbery since leaving prison.
He was sentenced to death in 2019 and is currently 39 years old on death row in Terre Haute.
FBI reportedly asked death row inmate to help search victim's body
Chadrick Fawkes and Brandon Basham
In 2005, he escaped from a Kentucky prison and committed violent crimes across state lines, including kidnapping, raping, and murdering two women, Samantha Burns, 19, and Alice Donovan, 44. Two professional thieves.
The two had been on the run for 17 days. They killed Donovan in South Carolina and Burns in West Virginia.
On April 12, 2005, Chadrick Foulkes of Lincoln County, West Virginia, is escorted by U.S. Marshals from the federal courthouse in Huntington, West Virginia. (AP Photo/Herald-Dispatch, Randy Snyder)
They stole the first getaway car in Indiana, tied its owner to a tree and left him alive. They committed other thefts, robberies and carjackings before police rearrested them.
Fulks, 47, and Basham, 43, are both awaiting execution in Terre Haute.
Brandon Basham, 21, was photographed on November 4, 2002, after he escaped from the Hopkins County Jail. (Ashland Police Department/Getty Images)
Kaboni Savage
Savage was a Philadelphia drug lord who ordered 12 murders, including an arson attack that killed six people.
He set his associates on fire for revenge on another cocaine trafficker named Eugene Coleman who became an FBI informant.
Coleman was not home. The fire killed a mother, her 15-month-old son, three children between the ages of 10 and 15, and one other adult.
Savage was also convicted of ordering or participating in six other murders.
He is 49 years old and is also being held in Florence.
daryl lawrence
Lawrence is a serial bank robber who killed 33-year-old police officer Brian Hurst during an attempted raid in Columbus, Ohio, in 2005.
The paper said a gunman entered the bank and fired, striking Hearst, who was stationed inside the bank on special duty, just above his vest. Officer Down Memorial Page.
Mr. Hurst, a Marine Corps veteran whose daughter was 6 months old at the time, returned fire, injuring Mr. Lawrence.
The suspect abandoned the robbery attempt and fled without harming anyone.
Lawrence, 49, is on death row in Terre Haute.
Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers sentenced to death
robert bowers
Bowers is a former truck driver who broke into Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Synaog in 2018 and shot and killed 11 Jewish worshipers.
Robert Bowers in an undated Pennsylvania driver's license photo. He was convicted of murdering 11 Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. (Pennsylvania Department of Transportation)
Bowers, now 52, was originally prosecuted under the first Trump administration and former Attorney General Bill Barr.
He was sentenced to death in 2023, even though the Biden-Harris administration halted executions. He is on death row in Terre Haute.
Another exception to Biden's stay of execution is Peyton Gendron, who attacked a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in 2022 and killed 10 Black people in a live-streamed hate crime massacre. Although he is not on death row, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced in January that the Justice Department would seek the death penalty.
Tops Market shooter Payton Gendron listens during a public hearing on February 15, 2023 in Buffalo, New York. (Derek Gee/Buffalo News via AP/Pool)
President Trump also vowed to expand the death penalty to other crimes, including child rape, human trafficking, and drug trafficking.
The death penalty is given only to the worst of the worst criminals. To avoid arbitrary imposition, courts follow a system of weighing aggravating and mitigating factors.
The death penalty is most often imposed on murderers, but it can also be imposed on spies, traitors, and serious drug traffickers.
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In many states, killing a police officer is already considered an aggravated crime during sentencing. Likewise, killing helpless people, such as children or elderly victims.
People convicted of drug crimes may be sentenced to death under federal law. This is especially true if someone died in connection with the incident, if there was a prior felony conviction, if a minor was used to traffic drugs, or if drugs were sold near a school.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
