Capital punishment in the United States
In the United States, capital punishment is a legal penalty in 27 states, throughout the country at the federal level, and in American Samoa. It is also a legal penalty for some military offenses. Capital punishment has been abolished in the other 23 states and in the federal capital, Washington, D.C. It is constitutionally permitted only for murder, with permissibility for use for crimes against the state not having been legally decided. Although it is a legal penalty in 27 states, only 21 of them have authority to execute death sentences, with the other 6 subject to moratoriums.
As of 2025, four of the 38 OECD member states retain capital punishment. South Korea has observed an unofficial moratorium on executions since 1997 and capital punishment is nigh-abolished in Israel since it is only legal for crimes against humanity and treason and has not been used since 1962. Thus, Japan and Taiwan are the only other advanced democracies with capital punishment. In both countries, the death penalty remains quite broadly supported.
Capital punishment in the United States can be traced to early colonial Virginia. There were no executions in the United States between 1967 and 1977. In 1972, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down capital punishment statutes in Furman v. Georgia, reducing all pending death sentences to life imprisonment. Subsequently, a majority of states enacted new death penalty statutes, and the court affirmed the legality of the practice in the 1976 case Gregg v. Georgia. Since then, more than 8,500 defendants have been sentenced to death; of these, more than 1,605 have been executed. Most executions are carried out by states. For every 8.2 people executed, one person on death row has been exonerated, in the modern era. At least 200 people who were sentenced to death since 1973 have been exonerated. That would be about 2.2% or one in 46.
In 2019, the Trump administration's Department of Justice announced its plans to resume executions for federal crimes. On July 14, 2020, Daniel Lewis Lee became the first inmate executed by the federal government since 2003. Thirteen federal death row inmates were executed, all under Trump. The last and most recent federal execution was of Dustin Higgs, who was executed on January 16, 2021. On July 1, 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland imposed a moratorium on federal executions. In April 2022, 2,414 people were on federal or state death row.
On December 23, 2024, President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal civilian death row to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole; 3 people remain on federal death row. Pursuant to Executive Order 14164, signed by Donald Trump on January 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memorandum on February 5, 2025 that rescinded the Garland moratorium on federal executions. The memorandum also directed the Justice Department to strengthen the death penalty and seek its application by prosecutors whenever reasonable.
The last public execution in the U.S. was of August 14, 1936, in Kentucky before a crowd of 20,000 people. This was followed by a period from 1936 to 1937 where executions were semi-public and after which most states began requiring executions to be held privately. Laws generally prohibit public attendance, though journalists and selected individuals may witness them. Timothy McVeigh's 2001 execution was viewed by over 200 people, mainly victims' families, via closed-circuit TV.
History
Pre-''Furman'' history
The first recorded death sentence in the British North American colonies was carried out in 1608 on Captain George Kendall, who was executed by firing squad at the Jamestown colony for spying on behalf of the Spanish government. Executions in colonial America were also carried out by hanging. The hangman's noose was one of the various punishments the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony applied to enforce religious and intellectual conformity on the whole community.The Bill of Rights adopted in 1789 included the Eighth Amendment which prohibited cruel and unusual punishment. The Fifth Amendment was drafted with language implying a possible use of the death penalty, requiring a grand jury indictment for "capital crime" and a due process of law for deprivation of "life" by the government. The Fourteenth Amendment adopted in 1868 also requires a due process of law for deprivation of life by any states. The federal death penalty was restricted to a small category of crimes. Founders saw the ultimate penalty as a means of protecting sovereign interests. Death penalty was carried out according to local customs.
The Espy file, compiled by M. Watt Espy and John Ortiz Smykla, lists 15,269 people executed in the United States and its predecessor colonies between 1608 and 1991. From 1930 to 2002, there were 4,661 executions in the United States; about two-thirds of them in the first 20 years. Additionally, the United States Army executed 160 soldiers between 1942 and 1961, the most recent being John A. Bennett.
Early abolition movement
Three states abolished the death penalty for murder during the 19th century: Michigan in 1847, Wisconsin in 1853, and Maine in 1887. Rhode Island is also a state with a long abolitionist background, having repealed the death penalty in 1852, though it was available for murder committed by a prisoner between 1872 and 1984.Other states which abolished the death penalty for murder before Gregg v. Georgia include Minnesota in 1911, Vermont in 1964, Iowa and West Virginia in 1965, and North Dakota in 1973. Hawaii abolished the death penalty in 1948 and Alaska in 1957, both before their statehood. Puerto Rico repealed it in 1929 and the District of Columbia in 1981. Arizona and Oregon abolished the death penalty by popular vote in 1916 and 1964 respectively, but both reinstated it, again by popular vote, some years later; Arizona reinstated the death penalty in 1918 and Oregon in 1978. In Oregon, the measure reinstating the death penalty was overturned by the Oregon Supreme Court in 1981, but Oregon voters again reinstated the death penalty in 1984. Puerto Rico and Michigan are the only two U.S. jurisdictions to have explicitly prohibited capital punishment in their constitutions: in 1952 and 1964, respectively.
Constitutional law developments
Capital punishment was used by 6 of 50 states in 2022. They were Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas. Government executions, as reported by Amnesty International, took place in 20 of the world's 195 countries. The Federal government of the United States, which had not executed a prisoner since 2003, did so in 2020, in an effort led by President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr.Executions for various crimes, especially murder and rape, occurred from the creation of the United States up to the early 1960s. Until then, "save for a few mavericks, no one gave any credence to the possibility of ending the death penalty by judicial interpretation of constitutional law", according to abolitionist Hugo Bedau.
The possibility of challenging the constitutionality of the death penalty became progressively more realistic after the Supreme Court of the United States decided on Trop v. Dulles in 1958. The Supreme Court declared explicitly, for the first time, that the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishment clause must draw its meaning from the "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society", rather than from its original meaning. Also in the 1932 case Powell v. Alabama, the court made the first step of what would later be called "death is different" jurisprudence, when it held that any indigent defendant was entitled to a court-appointed attorney in capital cases – a right that was only later extended to non-capital defendants in 1963, with Gideon v. Wainwright.
Capital punishment suspended (1972)
In Furman v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court considered a group of consolidated cases. The lead case involved an individual convicted under Georgia's death penalty statute, which featured a "unitary trial" procedure in which the jury was asked to return a verdict of guilt or innocence and, simultaneously, determine whether the defendant would be punished by death or life imprisonment. The last pre-Furman execution was that of Luis Monge on June 2, 1967.In a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court struck down the impositions of the death penalty in each of the consolidated cases as unconstitutional in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. The Supreme Court has never ruled the death penalty to be per se unconstitutional. The five justices in the majority did not produce a common opinion or rationale for their decision, however, and agreed only on a short statement announcing the result. The narrowest opinions, those of Byron White and Potter Stewart, expressed generalized concerns about the inconsistent application of the death penalty across a variety of cases, but did not exclude the possibility of a constitutional death penalty law. Stewart and William O. Douglas worried explicitly about racial discrimination in enforcement of the death penalty. Thurgood Marshall and William J. Brennan Jr. expressed the opinion that the death penalty was proscribed absolutely by the Eighth Amendment as cruel and unusual punishment. This decision was reached by the suspicion that many states, particularly in the South, were using capital punishment as a form of legal lynching of African-American males, inasmuch as almost all executions for non-homicidal rape in the Southern states involved a black perpetrator, and this suspicion was fueled by cases such as the Martinsville Seven, when seven African-American men were executed by Virginia in 1951 for the gang rape of a white woman.
The Furman decision caused all death sentences pending at the time to be reduced to life imprisonment, and was described by scholars as a "legal bombshell". The next day, columnist Barry Schweid wrote that it was "unlikely" that the death penalty could exist anymore in the United States.