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Capital punishment in the United States

In the United States, capital punishment is a legal penalty throughout the country at the federal level, in 27 states, and in American Samoa.[b][1] It is also a legal penalty for some military offenses. Capital punishment has been abolished in 23 states and in the federal capital, Washington, D.C.[2] It is usually applied for only the most serious crimes, like aggravated murder. Although it is a legal penalty in 27 states, 20 states have the ability to execute death sentences, with the other seven, as well as the federal government, being subject to different types of moratoriums. The existence of capital punishment in the United States can be traced to early colonial Virginia.[3] Along with Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan, the United States is one of four advanced democracies and the only Western nation that applies the death penalty regularly.[4][5][6][7][8] It is one of 54 countries worldwide applying it, and was the first to develop lethal injection as a method of execution, which has since been adopted by five other countries.[9] The Philippines has since abolished executions, and Guatemala has done so for civil offenses, leaving the United States as one of four countries to still use this method (along with China, Thailand, and Vietnam). It is common practice for the condemned to be administered sedatives prior to execution, regardless of the method used.[10][11][12]

Without the death penalty:
  Capital punishment repealed, never instituted, or struck down as unconstitutional (23 states, 5 territories)[a]
With the death penalty:
  Capital punishment in statute, but executions formally suspended (7 states)
  Capital punishment in statute, but no executions within the last 10 years (8 states, 1 territory)
  Capital punishment in statute, but executions informally suspended (1 state)
  Executions carried out within the last 10 years and capital punishment currently in statute (11 states)
Map displaying the status of capital punishment since 1970 by jurisdiction:
  Capital punishment abolished or struck down
  Capital punishment is a legal penalty.

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 at the time.[13] 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 8,700 defendants have been sentenced to death;[14] of these, more than 1,550 have been executed.[15][16] At least 190 people who were sentenced to death since 1972 have since been exonerated, about 2.2% or one in 46.[17][18] As of April 13, 2022, about 2,400 to 2,500 convicts are still on the death row.[19]

The Trump administration's Department of Justice announced its plans to resume executions for federal crimes in 2019. On July 14, 2020, Daniel Lewis Lee became the first inmate executed by the federal government since 2003.[20] As of January 2022, there were 44 inmates on federal death row.[21] Thirteen federal death row inmates have been executed since federal executions resumed in July 2020. The last and most recent federal execution was of Dustin Higgs, who was executed on January 16, 2021. Higgs' execution was also the last under the presidency of Donald Trump.[22] On July 1, 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that a moratorium on the federal death penalty was being reinstated.[23]

The Human Rights Measurement Initiative gives the US a score of 5.6 out of 10 for the right to freedom from the death penalty.[24]

History

Pre-Furman history

 
Executions in the United States from 1608 to 2020

The first recorded death sentence in the British North American colonies was carried out in 1608 on Captain George Kendall,[25] who was executed by firing squad[26] at the Jamestown colony for spying on behalf of the Spanish government.[27] 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.[28]

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.[29] The Fourteenth Amendment adopted in 1868 also requires a due process of law for deprivation of life by any states.

The Espy file,[30] 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 U.S., about two-thirds of them in the first 20 years.[31] Additionally, the United States Army executed 135 soldiers between 1916 and 1961 (the most recent).[32][33][34]

Early abolition movement

Three states abolished the death penalty for murder during the 19th century: Michigan (which has never executed a prisoner since achieving statehood, and which is the first government in the English-speaking world to abolish capital punishment)[35] 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 theoretically 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.[36] 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.[37] Government executions, as reported by Amnesty International, took place in 20 of the world's 195 countries. The Federal government, however, which had not executed for 16 years prior, did so in 2020, pushed by 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 beginning of the 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.[38]

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".[13] The next day, columnist Barry Schweid wrote that it was "unlikely" that the death penalty could exist anymore in the United States.[39]

Capital punishment reinstated (1976)

 
U.S. Supreme Court, Washington, D.C.

Instead of abandoning capital punishment, 37 states enacted new death penalty statutes that attempted to address the concerns of White and Stewart in Furman. Some states responded by enacting mandatory death penalty statutes which prescribed a sentence of death for anyone convicted of certain forms of murder. White had hinted that such a scheme would meet his constitutional concerns in his Furman opinion. Other states adopted "bifurcated" trial and sentencing procedures, with various procedural limitations on the jury's ability to pronounce a death sentence designed to limit juror discretion.

On July 2, 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Gregg v. Georgia[40] and upheld 7–2 a Georgia procedure in which the trial of capital crimes was bifurcated into guilt-innocence and sentencing phases. At the first proceeding, the jury decides the defendant's guilt; if the defendant is innocent or otherwise not convicted of first-degree murder, the death penalty will not be imposed. At the second hearing, the jury determines whether certain statutory aggravating factors exist, whether any mitigating factors exist, and, in many jurisdictions, weigh the aggravating and mitigating factors in assessing the ultimate penalty – either death or life in prison, either with or without parole. The same day, in Woodson v. North Carolina[41] and Roberts v. Louisiana,[42] the court struck down 5–4 statutes providing a mandatory death sentence.

Executions resumed on January 17, 1977, when Gary Gilmore went before a firing squad in Utah. Although hundreds of individuals were sentenced to death in the United States during the 1970s and early 1980s, only ten people besides Gilmore (who had waived all of his appeal rights) were actually executed prior to 1984.

Following the decision, the use of capital punishment in the United States soared.[43] This was in contrast to trends in other parts of advanced industrial democracies where the use of capital punishment declined or was prohibited.[43] Members of the Council of Europe comply with the European Convention of Human Rights which prohibits capital punishment. The last execution in the UK took place in 1964,[44] and in 1977 in France.

Supreme Court narrows capital offenses

In 1977, the Supreme Court's Coker v. Georgia decision barred the death penalty for rape of an adult woman. Previously, the death penalty for rape of an adult had been gradually phased out in the United States, and at the time of the decision, Georgia and the Federal government were the only two jurisdictions to still retain the death penalty for this offense.

In the 1980 case Godfrey v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that murder can be punished by death only if it involves a narrow and precise aggravating factor.[45]

The U.S. Supreme Court has placed two major restrictions on the use of the death penalty. First, the case of Atkins v. Virginia, decided on June 20, 2002,[46] held that the execution of intellectually disabled inmates is unconstitutional. Second, in 2005, the court's decision in Roper v. Simmons[47] struck down executions for offenders under the age of 18 at the time of the crime.

In the 2008 case Kennedy v. Louisiana, the court also held 5–4 that the death penalty is unconstitutional when applied to non-homicidal crimes against the person, including child rape. Only two death row inmates (both in Louisiana) were affected by the decision.[48] Nevertheless, the ruling came less than five months before the 2008 presidential election and was criticized by both major party candidates Barack Obama and John McCain.[49]

Repeal movements and legal challenges

In 2004, New York's and Kansas' capital sentencing schemes were struck down by their respective states' highest courts. Kansas successfully appealed the Kansas Supreme Court decision to the United States Supreme Court, which reinstated the statute in Kansas v. Marsh (2006), holding it did not violate the U.S. Constitution. The decision of the New York Court of Appeals was based on the state constitution, making unavailable any appeal. The state lower house has since blocked all attempts to reinstate the death penalty by adopting a valid sentencing scheme.[50] In 2016, Delaware's death penalty statute was also struck down by its state supreme court.[51]

In 2007, New Jersey became the first state to repeal the death penalty by legislative vote since Gregg v. Georgia,[52] followed by New Mexico in 2009,[53][54] Illinois in 2011,[55] Connecticut in 2012,[56][57] and Maryland in 2013.[58] The repeals were not retroactive, but in New Jersey, Illinois and Maryland, governors commuted all death sentences after enacting the new law.[59] In Connecticut, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that the repeal must be retroactive. In New Mexico, capital punishment for certain offenses is still possible for National Guard members in Title 32 status under the state's Code of Military Justice (NMSA 20–12), and for capital offenses committed prior to the repeal of the state's death penalty statute.[60][61]

Nebraska's legislature also passed a repeal in 2015, but a referendum campaign gathered enough signatures to suspend it. Capital punishment was reinstated by popular vote on November 8, 2016. The same day, California's electorate defeated a proposal to repeal the death penalty, and adopted another initiative to speed up its appeal process.[62]

On October 11, 2018, Washington state became the 20th state to abolish capital punishment when its state Supreme Court deemed the death penalty unconstitutional on the grounds of racial bias.[63] The state later abolished it through legislation passed in 2023.[64]

New Hampshire became the 21st state to abolish capital punishment on May 30, 2019, when its state senate overrode Governor Sununu's veto by a vote of 16–8.[65]

Colorado became the 22nd state to abolish capital punishment when governor Jared Polis signed a repeal bill on March 23, 2020, and commuted all existing death sentences in the state to life without parole.[66]

Virginia became the 23rd state to abolish capital punishment, and the first Southern state to do so when governor Ralph Northam signed a repeal bill on March 24, 2021, and commuted all existing death sentences in the state to life without parole.[67][68]

Since Furman, 11 states have organized popular votes dealing with the death penalty through the initiative and referendum process. All resulted in a vote for reinstating it, rejecting its abolition, expanding its application field, specifying in the state constitution that it is not unconstitutional, or expediting the appeal process in capital cases.[36]

States that have abolished the death penalty

A total of 23 states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have abolished the death penalty for all crimes. Below is a table of the states and the date that the state abolished the death penalty.[69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76] Michigan became the first English-speaking territory in the world to abolish capital punishment in 1847. Although treason remained a crime punishable by the death penalty in Michigan despite the 1847 abolition, no one was ever executed under that law, and Michigan's 1962 Constitutional Convention codified that the death penalty was fully abolished.[77] Vermont has abolished the death penalty for all crimes, but has an invalid death penalty statue for treason.[78] When it abolished the death penalty in 2019, New Hampshire explicitly did not commute the death sentence of the sole person remaining on the state's death row.[79][80]

 
Map displaying the status of capital punishment since 1970 by state:
  States with the death penalty
  States without the death penalty
State/District/Territory Year Last
execution
Alaska 1957 1950
Colorado 2020 1997
Connecticut 2012 2005
Delaware 2016 2012
District of Columbia 1981 1957
Hawaii 1957 1947
Illinois 2011 1999
Iowa 1965 1962
Maine 1887 1885
Maryland 2013 2005
Massachusetts 1984 1947
Michigan 1963 1837
Minnesota 1911 1906
New Hampshire 2019 1939
New Jersey 2007 1963
New Mexico 2009 2001
New York 2007 1963
North Dakota 1973 1905
Rhode Island 1984 1845
Puerto Rico 1929 1927
Vermont 1972 1954
Virginia 2021 2017
Washington 2018 2010
West Virginia 1965 1959
Wisconsin 1853 1851

Modern era

 
The lethal injection room in Florida State Prison

In 1982, Texas carried out the first execution by lethal injection in world history and lethal injection subsequently became the preferred method throughout the country, displacing the electric chair.[81] From 1976 to 8 December 2016, there were 1,533 executions, of which 1,349 were by lethal injection, 163 by electrocution, 11 by gas inhalation, 3 by hanging, and 3 by firing squad.[82] The South had the great majority of these executions, with 1,249; there were 190 in the Midwest, 86 in the West, and only 4 in the Northeast. No state in the Northeast has conducted an execution since Connecticut, now abolitionist, in 2005. The state of Texas alone conducted 571 executions, over 1/3 of the total; the states of Texas, Virginia (now abolitionist), and Oklahoma combined make up over half the total, with 802 executions between them.[83] 17 executions have been conducted by the federal government.[84] Executions increased in frequency until 1999; 98 prisoners were executed that year. Since 1999, the number of executions has greatly decreased, and the 17 executions in 2020 were the fewest since 1991.[15] A 2016 poll conducted by Pew Research, found that support nationwide for the death penalty in the U.S. had fallen below 50% for the first time since the beginning of the post-Gregg era.[85]

The death penalty became an issue during the 1988 presidential election. It came up in the October 13, 1988, debate between the two presidential nominees George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, when Bernard Shaw, the moderator of the debate, asked Dukakis, "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis [his wife] were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?" Dukakis replied, "No, I don't, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime." Bush was elected, and many, including Dukakis himself, cite the statement as the beginning of the end of his campaign.[86]

In 1996, Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act to streamline the appeal process in capital cases. The bill was signed into law by President Bill Clinton, who had endorsed capital punishment during his 1992 presidential campaign.

A study found that at least 34 of the 749 executions carried out in the U.S. between 1977 and 2001, or 4.5%, involved "unanticipated problems or delays that caused, at least arguably, unnecessary agony for the prisoner or that reflect gross incompetence of the executioner". The rate of these "botched executions" remained steady over the period.[87] A study published in The Lancet in 2005 found that in 43% of cases of lethal injection, the blood level of hypnotics in the prisoner was insufficient to ensure unconsciousness.[88] Nonetheless, the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 (Baze v. Rees), again in 2015 (Glossip v. Gross), and a third time in 2019 (Bucklew v. Precythe), that lethal injection does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment.[89][90]

On July 25, 2019, Attorney General William Barr ordered the resumption of federal executions after a 16-year hiatus, and set five execution dates for December 2019 and January 2020.[91][92][93][94] After the Supreme Court upheld a stay on these executions,[95] the stay was lifted in June 2020 and four executions were rescheduled for July and August 2020.[96] The federal government executed Daniel Lewis Lee on July 14, 2020. He became the first convict executed by the federal government since 2003.[20] Before Trump's term ended in January 2021, the federal government carried out a total of 13 executions.[97]

Women's history and capital punishment

In 1632, 24 years after the first recorded male execution in the colonies, Jane Champion became the first woman known to have been lawfully executed. She was sentenced to death by hanging after she was convicted of infanticide; around two-thirds of women executed in the 17th and early 18th centuries were convicted of child murder. A married woman, it is not known whether Champion's illicit lover, William Gallopin, also convicted of their child's murder, was also executed, although it appears he was so sentenced.[98][99] For the Puritans, infanticide was the worst form of murder.[100]

Women accounted for just one fifth of all executions between 1632 and 1759, in the colonial United States. Women were more likely to be acquitted, and the relatively low number of executions of women may have been impacted by the scarcity of female laborers. Slavery was not yet widespread in the 17th century mainland and planters relied mostly on Irish indentured servants. To maintain subsistence levels in those days everyone had to do farm work, including women.[98]

The second half of the 17th century saw the executions of 14 women and 6 men who were accused of witchcraft during the witch hunt hysteria and the Salem Witch Trials. While both men and women were executed, 80% of the accusations were towards women, so the list of executions disproportionately affected men by a margin of 6 (actual) to 4 (expected), i.e. 50% more men were executed than expected from the percentage of accused who were men.[101]

Other notable female executions include Mary Surratt, Margie Velma Barfield and Wanda Jean Allen. Mary Surratt was executed by hanging in 1865 after being convicted of co-conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.[102] Margie Velma Barfield was convicted of murder and when she was executed by lethal injection in 1984, she became the first woman to be executed since the ban on capital punishment was lifted in 1976.[103] Wanda Jean Allen was convicted of murder in 1989 and had a high-profile execution by lethal injection in January 2001. She was the first black woman to be executed in the US since 1954.[104] Allen's appellate lawyers did not deny her guilt, but claimed that prosecutors capitalized on her low IQ, race and homosexuality in their representations of her as a murderer at trial. The tactic did not work.[105]

The federal government executes women infrequently. Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of espionage, was executed in the electric chair on June 19, 1953, and Bonnie Brown Heady, convicted of kidnapping and murder, was executed in the gas chamber later that same year on December 18. Since Heady, only one more woman has been executed: Lisa Montgomery, convicted of killing a pregnant woman and cutting out and kidnapping her baby, by lethal injection in Indiana on January 13, 2021. Her execution had been stayed while her lawyers argued that she had mental health issues, but the Supreme Court lifted the stay.[106][107]

Juvenile capital punishment

In 1642, the first ever juvenile, Thomas Graunger, was sentenced to death in Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts, for bestiality. Since then, at least 361 other juveniles have been sentenced to the death penalty.[citation needed] Kent v. United States (1966), turned the tides for juvenile capital punishment sentencing when it limited the waiver discretion juvenile courts had. Before this case, juvenile courts had the freedom to waiver juvenile cases to criminal courts without a hearing, which did not make the waiving process consistent across states. Discussions about abolishing the death penalty started occurring between 1983 and 1986. In 1987, Thompson v. Oklahoma, the Supreme Court threw away William Wayne Thompson's death sentence due to it being cruel and unusual punishment, as he was 15 years old at the time of the crime he committed; the judgment established that "evolving standards of decency" made it inappropriate to apply the death penalty for people under 16 years old at the time of their capital crime,[108] although Thompson held that it was still constitutional to sentence juveniles 16 years or older to the death penalty.

It was not until Roper v. Simmons that the juvenile death penalty was abolished due to the United States Supreme Court finding that the execution of juveniles is in conflict with the Eighth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment, which deal with cruel and unusual punishment. Prior to completely abolishing the juvenile death penalty in 2005, any juvenile aged 16 years or older could be sentenced to death in some states, the last of whom was Scott Hain, executed in Oklahoma in 2003 for burning two people to death in a robbery at age 17.[109] Prior to Roper, there were 71 people on death row in the United States for crimes committed as juveniles.[110] Since 2005, there have been no executions nor discussion of executing juveniles in the United States.

Execution statistics

Number of executed people in the United States since 1977 (Total, withholding current year: 1,558)
1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994
1 0 2 0 1 2 5 21 18 18 25 11 16 23 14 31 38 31
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
56 45 74 68 98 85 66 71 65 59 60 53 42 37 52 46 43 43
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
39 35 28 20 23 25 22 17 11 18 17

 

Capital crimes

Aggravated murder

Aggravating factors for seeking capital punishment of murder vary greatly among death penalty states. California has twenty-two.[111] Some aggravating circumstances are nearly universal, such as robbery-murder, murder involving rape of the victim, and murder of an on-duty police officer.[112]

Several states have included child murder to their list of aggravating factors, but the victim's age under which the murder is punishable by death varies. In 2011, Texas raised this age from six to ten.[113]

In some states, the high number of aggravating factors has been criticized on account of giving prosecutors too much discretion in choosing cases where they believe capital punishment is warranted. In California especially, an official commission proposed, in 2008, to reduce these factors to five (multiple murders, torture murder, murder of a police officer, murder committed in jail, and murder related to another felony).[114] Columnist Charles Lane went further, and proposed that murder related to a felony other than rape should no longer be a capital crime when there is only one victim killed.[115]

Aggravating factors in federal court

In order for a person to be eligible for a death sentence when convicted of aggravated first-degree murder, the jury or court (when there is not a jury) must determine at least one of sixteen aggravating factors that existed during the crime's commission. The following is a list of the 16 aggravating factors under federal law.[116]

  1. Murder while committing another felony.[117]
  2. Offender was convicted of a separate felony involving a firearm prior to the aggravated murder.
  3. Being convicted of a separate felony where death or life imprisonment was authorized prior to the aggravated murder.
  4. Being convicted of any separate violent felony prior to the aggravated murder.
  5. The offender put the lives of at least 1 or more other persons in danger of death during the commission of the crime.
  6. Offender committed the crime in an especially cruel, heinous, or depraved manner.
  7. Offender committed the crime for financial gain.
  8. Offender committed the crime for monetary gain.
  9. The murder was premeditated, involved planning in order to be carried out, or the offender showed early signs of committing the crime, such as keeping a journal of the crime's details[118] and posting things on the Internet.[119]
  10. Offender was previously convicted of at least two drug offenses.
  11. The victim would not have been able to defend themselves while being attacked.
  12. Offender was previously convicted of a federal drug offense.
  13. Offender was involved in a long-term business of selling drugs to minors.
  14. A high-ranking official was murdered, such as the President of the United States, the leader of another country, or a police officer.
  15. Offender was previously convicted of sexual assault or child rape.
  16. During the crime's commission, the offender killed or tried to kill multiple people.[120]

Crimes against the state

The opinion of the court in Kennedy v. Louisiana says that the ruling does not apply to "treason, espionage, terrorism, and drug kingpin activity, which are offenses against the State".[121]

Since no one is on death row for such offenses, the court has yet to rule on the constitutionality of the death penalty applied for them.

Treason, espionage and large-scale drug trafficking are all capital crimes under federal law. Treason is also punishable by death in six states (Arkansas, California, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina). Large-scale drug trafficking is punishable by death in two states (Florida and Missouri),[122] and aircraft hijacking in two others (Georgia and Mississippi). Vermont has an invalidated pre-Furman statute allowing the electric chair for treason despite abolishing capital punishment in 1965.[123]

Legal process

The legal administration of the death penalty in the United States typically involves five critical steps: (1) prosecutorial decision to seek the death penalty (2) sentencing, (3) direct review, (4) state collateral review, and (5) federal habeas corpus.

Clemency, through which the Governor or President of the jurisdiction can unilaterally reduce or abrogate a death sentence, is an executive rather than judicial process.[124]

Decision to seek the death penalty

While judges in criminal cases can usually impose a harsher prison sentence than the one demanded by prosecution, the death penalty can be handed down only if the accuser has specifically decided to seek it.

In the decades since Furman, new questions have emerged about whether or not prosecutorial arbitrariness has replaced sentencing arbitrariness. A study by Pepperdine University School of Law published in Temple Law Review, surveyed the decision-making process among prosecutors in various states. The authors found that prosecutors' capital punishment filing decisions are marked by local "idiosyncrasies", and that wide prosecutorial discretion remains because of overly broad criteria. California law, for example, has 22 "special circumstances", making nearly all first-degree murders potential capital cases.[125]

A proposed remedy against prosecutorial arbitrariness is to transfer the prosecution of capital cases to the state attorney general.[126]

In 2017, Florida governor Rick Scott removed all capital cases from local prosecutor Aramis Ayala because she decided to never seek the death penalty no matter the gravity of the crime.[127]

Sentencing

Of the 27 states with the death penalty, 25 require the sentence to be decided by the jury, and 24 require a unanimous decision by the jury.

Two states do not use juries in death penalty cases. In Nebraska the sentence is decided by a three-judge panel, which must unanimously agree on death, and the defendant is sentenced to life imprisonment if one of the judges is opposed.[128] Montana is the only state where the trial judge decides the sentence alone.[129] The only state which does not require a unanimous jury decision is Alabama. At least 10 jurors must concur, and a retrial happens if the jury deadlocks.[130]

In all states in which the jury is involved, only death-qualified prospective jurors can be selected in such a jury, to exclude both people who will always vote for the death sentence and those who are categorically opposed to it. However, the states differ on what happens if the penalty phase results in a hung jury:[131][132]

  • In four states (Arizona, California, Kentucky and Nevada), a retrial of the penalty phase will be conducted before a different jury (the common-law rule for mistrial).[133]
  • In two states (Indiana and Missouri), the judge will decide the sentence.
  • In the remaining states, a hung jury results in a life sentence, even if only one juror opposed death. Federal law also provides that outcome.

The first outcome is referred as the "true unanimity" rule, while the third has been criticized as the "single-juror veto" rule.[134]

Direct review

If a defendant is sentenced to death at the trial level, the case then goes into a direct review.[135] The direct review process is a typical legal appeal. An appellate court examines the record of evidence presented in the trial court and the law that the lower court applied and decides whether the decision was legally sound or not.[136] Direct review of a capital sentencing hearing will result in one of three outcomes. If the appellate court finds that no significant legal errors occurred in the capital sentencing hearing, the appellate court will affirm the judgment, or let the sentence stand.[135] If the appellate court finds that significant legal errors did occur, then it will reverse the judgment, or nullify the sentence and order a new capital sentencing hearing.[137] Lastly, if the appellate court finds that no reasonable juror could find the defendant eligible for the death penalty, a rarity, then it will order the defendant acquitted, or not guilty, of the crime for which he/she was given the death penalty, and order him sentenced to the next most severe punishment for which the offense is eligible.[137] About 60 percent survive the process of direct review intact.[138]

State collateral review

At times when a death sentence is affirmed on direct review, supplemental methods to attack the judgment, though less familiar than a typical appeal, do remain. These supplemental remedies are considered collateral review, that is, an avenue for upsetting judgments that have become otherwise final.[139] Where the prisoner received his death sentence in a state-level trial, as is usually the case, the first step in collateral review is state collateral review, which is often called state habeas corpus. (If the case is a federal death penalty case, it proceeds immediately from direct review to federal habeas corpus.) Although all states have some type of collateral review, the process varies widely from state to state.[140] Generally, the purpose of these collateral proceedings is to permit the prisoner to challenge his sentence on grounds that could not have been raised reasonably at trial or on direct review.[141] Most often, these are claims, such as ineffective assistance of counsel, which requires the court to consider new evidence outside the original trial record, something courts may not do in an ordinary appeal. State collateral review, though an important step in that it helps define the scope of subsequent review through federal habeas corpus, is rarely successful in and of itself. Only around 6 percent of death sentences are overturned on state collateral review.[142]

In Virginia, state habeas corpus for condemned men are heard by the state supreme court under exclusive original jurisdiction since 1995, immediately after direct review by the same court.[143] This avoids any proceeding before the lower courts, and is in part why Virginia has the shortest time on average between death sentence and execution (less than eight years) and has executed 113 offenders since 1976 with only five remaining on death row as of June 2017.[144][145]

To reduce litigation delays, other states require convicts to file their state collateral appeal before the completion of their direct appeal,[146] or provide adjudication of direct and collateral attacks together in a "unitary review".[147]

Federal habeas corpus

After a death sentence is affirmed in state collateral review, the prisoner may file for federal habeas corpus, which is a unique type of lawsuit that can be brought in federal courts. Federal habeas corpus is a type of collateral review, and it is the only way that state prisoners may attack a death sentence in federal court (other than petitions for certiorari to the United States Supreme Court after both direct review and state collateral review). The scope of federal habeas corpus is governed by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), which restricted significantly its previous scope. The purpose of federal habeas corpus is to ensure that state courts, through the process of direct review and state collateral review, have done a reasonable job in protecting the prisoner's federal constitutional rights. Prisoners may also use federal habeas corpus suits to bring forth new evidence that they are innocent of the crime, though to be a valid defense at this late stage in the process, evidence of innocence must be truly compelling.[148] According to Eric M. Freedman, 21 percent of death penalty cases are reversed through federal habeas corpus.[142]

James Liebman, a professor of law at Columbia Law School, stated in 1996 that his study found that when habeas corpus petitions in death penalty cases were traced from conviction to completion of the case, there was "a 40 percent success rate in all capital cases from 1978 to 1995".[149] Similarly, a study by Ronald Tabak in a law review article puts the success rate in habeas corpus cases involving death row inmates even higher, finding that between "1976 and 1991, approximately 47 percent of the habeas petitions filed by death row inmates were granted".[150] The different numbers are largely definitional, rather than substantive: Freedam's statistics looks at the percentage of all death penalty cases reversed, while the others look only at cases not reversed prior to habeas corpus review.

A similar process is available for prisoners sentenced to death by the judgment of a federal court.[151]

The AEDPA also provides an expeditious habeas procedure in capital cases for states meeting several requirements set forth in it concerning counsel appointment for death row inmates.[152] Under this program, federal habeas corpus for condemned prisoners would be decided in about three years from affirmance of the sentence on state collateral review. In 2006, Congress conferred the determination of whether a state fulfilled the requirements to the U.S. attorney general, with a possible appeal of the state to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. As of March 2016, the Department of Justice has still not granted any certifications.[153]

Section 1983

If the federal court refuses to issue a writ of habeas corpus, the death sentence ordinarily becomes final for all purposes. In recent times, however, prisoners have postponed execution through another avenue of federal litigation; the Civil Rights Act of 1871 – codified at 42 U.S.C. § 1983 – allows complainants to bring lawsuits against state actors to protect their federal constitutional and statutory rights.

While direct appeals are normally limited to just one and automatically stay the execution of the death sentence, Section 1983 lawsuits are unlimited, but the petitioner will be granted a stay of execution only if the court believes he has a likelihood of success on the merits.[154]

Traditionally, Section 1983 was of limited use for a state prisoner under sentence of death because the Supreme Court has held that habeas corpus, not Section 1983, is the only vehicle by which a state prisoner can challenge his judgment of death.[155] In the 2006 Hill v. McDonough case, however, the United States Supreme Court approved the use of Section 1983 as a vehicle for challenging a state's method of execution as cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The theory is that a prisoner bringing such a challenge is not attacking directly his judgment of death, but rather the means by which that the judgment will be carried out. Therefore, the Supreme Court held in the Hill case that a prisoner can use Section 1983 rather than habeas corpus to bring the lawsuit. Yet, as Clarence Hill's own case shows, lower federal courts have often refused to hear suits challenging methods of execution on the ground that the prisoner brought the claim too late and only for the purposes of delay. Further, the Court's decision in Baze v. Rees, upholding a lethal injection method used by many states, has narrowed the opportunity for relief through Section 1983.

Execution warrant

While the execution warrant is issued by the governor in several states, in the vast majority it is a judicial order, issued by a judge or by the state supreme court at the request of the prosecution.

The warrant usually sets an execution day. Some states instead provide a longer period, such as a week-long or 10-day window to carry out the execution. This is designated to avoid issuing a new warrant in case of a last-minute stay of execution that would be vacated only few days or few hours later.[156]

Distribution of sentences

 
Total number of prisoners on death row in the United States from 1953 to 2008

In recent years there has been an average of one death sentence for every 200 murder convictions in the United States.

Alabama has the highest per capita rate of death sentences. This is because Alabama was one of the few states that allowed judges to override a jury recommendation in favor of life imprisonment, a possibility it removed in March 2017.[157][158]

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the top three factors determining whether a convict gets a death sentence in a murder case are not aggravating factors, but instead the location the crime occurred (and thus whether it is in the jurisdiction of a prosecutor aggressively using the death penalty), the quality of legal defense, and the race of the victim (murder of white victims being punished more harshly).[159]

Among states

The distribution of death sentences among states is loosely proportional to their populations and murder rates. California, which is the most populous state, also has the largest death row, with over 700 inmates. Wyoming, which is the least populous state, has only one condemned man.

But executions are more frequent (and happen more quickly after sentencing) in conservative states. Texas, which is the second most populous state in the Union, carried out over 500 executions during the post-Furman era, more than a third of the national total. California has carried out only 13 executions during the same period, and has carried out none since 2006.[160][161][162]

Among races

Certain races within the United States are disproportionately incarcerated at higher rates than others. African Americans, who make up only 13.6% of the total population are disproportionately incarcerated in the prison system compared to white Americans.[163]

Statistics

 
Racial demographic of death row inmates in the U.S.[163]
 
Racial demographic of District Attorneys in states that practice the death penalty in the U.S.[164][165]

African Americans make up 41% of death row inmates.[163][164] African Americans have made up 34% of those actually executed since 1976.[163][166] Twenty-one white offenders have been executed for the murder of a black person since 1976, compared to the 302 black offenders that have been executed for the murder of a white person during that same period.[164] Most individuals involved in determining the verdict in death penalty cases are white. As of 1998, Chief District Attorneys in counties using the death penalty are 98% white and only 1% are African-American.[165] A supporting fact discovered through examinations of racial disparities over the past twenty years concerning race and the death penalty found that in 96% of these reviews, there was "a pattern of either race-of-victim or race-of-defendant discrimination or both."[165] 80% of all capital cases involve white victims, despite white people only making up approximately 50% of murder victims.[167]

With regard to innocent convicts, 54 percent of people wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in the United States are black; 64 percent are non-white in general.[168]

63.8% of white death row inmates, 72.8% of black death row inmates, 65.4% of Latino death row inmates, and 63.8% of Native American death row inmates – or approximately 67% of death row inmates overall – have a prior felony conviction.[169] Approximately 13.5% of death row inmates are of Hispanic or Latino descent. In 2019, individuals identified as Hispanic and Latino Americans accounted for 5.5% of homicides.[170] The death penalty exhortation rate for Hispanic and Latino Americans is 8.6%.[168] Approximately 1.81% of death row inmates are of Asian descent.[171]

Organizations against the death penalty for racial equity

ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project

The ACLU's Capital Punishment Project (CPP) is an anti-death penalty project that works toward the repeal of the death penalty in the U.S. through advocacy and education.[172] The project highlights the racial discriminatory aspects regarding capital punishment and promotes both abolition and systemic reform of the death penalty through direct representation, strategic litigation, and systemic reform.[173]

Equal Justice USA

Equal Justice USA is a national organization dedicated to healing, racial equity, and community safety in relation to criminal justice and violence.[174] Their efforts spread wide and involve fundraising and hosting conventions to support communities of color. The organization is aimed towards people of color who have been disproportionately impacted by the death penalty.[175] Some of their efforts include advocacy to end the death penalty, which they have helped to abolish in nine states.[175]

Black Americans and capital punishment

The geographic distribution of capital punishment in the United States has a strong correlation with the history of slavery and lynchings.[3] States where slavery was legal before the Civil War also saw high numbers of lynchings after the civil war and into the 20th century. These states include Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.[176] These states also introduced a criminal justice system with Black Codes that would designed to control Black people after slavery was abolished in 1865 following the Emancipation Proclamation and then officially with the ratification of the 13th Amendment.[177] These states also have the highest rates of capital punishment sentences and executions today.[3]

Racial relationship between lynchings and capital punishment

Once slaveowners lost full ownership of formerly enslaved African-Americans in 1865, lynchings were increasingly used, both legally under the security of Black Codes and illegally, to maintain white dominance and prevent African-Americans from challenging their subordinate place in society.[176] Because of Black Codes, many African-Americans were sent to jail to participate in slave-like work in a system known as Convict leasing. Others faced capital punishment for alleged crimes, often in the form of lynching.[177] Lynchings were able to be carried out because many positions within southern law enforcement, including state officials, and judges were held by former Confederate soldiers.[178] Despite the passing of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which weakened the strength of Black Codes and supported the 14th Amendment, the rate of lynching of African-Americans saw an increase,[179] due the formation of the white-supremacist terrorist group, the Ku Klux Klan (K.K.K.), in 1865 by former Confederates during Reconstruction. They carried out many lynchings and terrorist attacks against Black people.[178] After the end of the Reconstruction in 1877, when federal troops were removed from southern states in which they assisted in upholding the 14th Amendment's promises of equal protection, Jim Crow laws began to gain traction which enforced segregation and the oppression of African-Americans. Segregation was legal under the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it unconstitutional.[179]

During and following the Civil Rights era, laws were introduced to prevent illegal lynchings by the general public. According to David Rigby and Charles Seguin, the popularity of capital punishment increased as a way for White people to control Black people and instill fear.[3] They argue that the disproportionate number of Black Americans sentenced to death during the 20th century, often wrongfully convicted, shows that capital punishment was used as a way for White people to control Black people in a similar manner to lynching. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled in Furman v. Georgia that capital punishment was unconstitutional. Rigby and Seguin argue that this led to an increase in the illegal lynchings of African-Americans.[3] In 1976 the Supreme Court decision in Gregg v. Georgia [180] upheld the death penalty and overturned Furman v. Georgia. Rigby and Seguin argue that this decision was based on a fear that lynchings by the general public would increase if the death penalty did not remain in place.[3]

Although more than 6,500 lynchings occurred between 1865 and 1950 according to the Equal Justice Initiative, lynching did not become a federal crime until 2022 under the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden, over a hundred years after Antilynching legislation was first proposed.[181]

21st century legal scholars, Civil Rights lawyers, and advocates, like Michelle Alexander, often refer to both past and modern police officers and officials of the United States' criminal justice system's as legalized, modern lynch mobs because they have the ability to sentence one to life in prison or with the death penalty under the law but with the jurisdiction of potentially incorporating their personal, racial biases.[182] The ability for a Black person to be convicted to death, with the potential that racial bias was used in their sentencing, was upheld during the McCleskey v. Kemp court case in Georgia.[183][182] Groups like the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund (LDF) have continuously worked and continue to work on abolishing capital punishment based on its historically racist associations with enslavement and lynching, and also its disproportionate impact on racial minority communities.[184]

Racial breakdown of sentences by state

Capital punishment is still active in 27 states, which including the following: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wyoming.[185] Of these, Oklahoma, Texas, Delaware, Missouri, and Alabama make up the top five states with the highest rate of executions per capita.[186] However, Texas, Oklahoma, Virginia, Florida, and Missouri are the top five states with the highest number of executions–Texas alone has imposed 570 executions since 1976.[186]

The racial makeup of the people sentenced to death reveals a disproportionate representation of Black people. Consider the following states with the highest execution rates per capita (defined as executions per 100,000 residents):

Top five states with the highest rates of execution per capita
State Rate of execution per capita (per 100,000 residents)[186] Number of executions*[186] Total population[187] % of state population that is Black[187] % of those currently on death row who are Black[163]
Oklahoma 2.83 112 3,986,639 7.8 40.5
Texas 1.97 570 29,527,941 13.2 45.2
Delaware** 1.64 16 1,003,384 23.6 --***
Missouri 1.47 90 6,168,187 11.8 30
Alabama 1.37 67 5,039,877 26.8 48.2

*since 1976

**Death penalty is now abolished.[186]

***Not applicable since the death penalty was abolished.

Texas

Capital punishment in Texas: Texas is the state with the highest number of cumulative executions since 1976. Black people make up about 45% of the current death row population in Texas,[188] though only make up about 13% of the state's general population.[189]

Oklahoma

Capital punishment in Oklahoma: Oklahoma is the state with the second highest number of cumulative executions since 1976. Black people make up 46% of death sentences in Oklahoma County, though only make up 16% of the county's total population.[190]

It is also the only state that has four methods of execution, while most others only have one or two methods. These methods of execution include: lethal injection, nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution, and firing squad.

Alabama

Capital punishment in Alabama: Alabama's death penalty sentences persist as it declines among many other states in the U.S. The state continues to have one of the nation's highest rates of death sentences per capita.[191] As of April 1, 2022, there are currently 80 Black people and 84 white people on death row.[163] Though the Black and white populations are both about half of the total death row population in Alabama, Black people are represented at a disproportionately high number considering they make up only 27% of Alabama's general population.[192]

Virginia

Capital punishment in Virginia: The death penalty in Virginia came to an end on March 24, 2021, when the state became the first Southern state to abolish the death penalty. Prior to abolition, Virginia had some of the most executions out of any state since 1976, as well as the most executions overall in the pre-Furman v. Georgia era.[193]

Exonerations

Exonerations, in relation to the death penalty, are defined as the absolving of someone from their previous verdict of guilty and sentencing of death. Since January 1, 1973, 103 out of the 190 total exonerations in the U.S. have been African Americans.[168] African Americans account for about 54% of all exonerations.

During the middle of the 20th century, a period of mass incarceration occurred in the United States.[194] The United States became the country with the highest incarceration rate which caused the prison population to become heavily Black by the 1990s whereas it was mainly only white in previous years.[194] White people accounted for 51% of the prison population while Black people accounted for 47% of the entire prison population during the 1990s.[195] Even though Black people made up of around half the jail inhabitants, they only were 12.1% of the United States population and white citizens made up 80.3% of the total population during that time.[196] The prison population had increased from 196,441 people in 1970 to 1.6 million by 2008.[194] This discrepancy of races in the prison population related to the overall demographics of the United States has to do with the inconsistency of police arrests on citizens. Moving into 2015, Black people still made up only 12.1% of the total population but made up 18% of people who were stopped by police on the road.[197] This led to the increase of disproportionate demographics in local jails and prison systems. By 2018, 592 Black people were in local jails per every 100,000 people and 2,271 Black men were incarcerated in federal prisons per 100,000 people.[197] On the other hand, white people were incarcerated at a rate of 187 per 100,000 people in local jails and white men, at the federal level, were incarcerated at a rate of 392 per 100,000 people.[197] This dramatic increase in Black arrests caused America's prison population to boom, which was all due to this long lasting period of mass incarceration.

Mass incarceration had been increasing and there are many factors sustaining its rise. From over-policing to disproportionately long prison sentences, Black people have been targeted in mass incarceration and as a result, more susceptible to capital punishment.[198]

Cases

With the United States' operation based on the U.S. Constitution, federalism allows the state government to share powers with the federal government.[199] Under the various capacities, different court cases are heard in the national and state court systems. A defendant can be inflicted with the death penalty if they are found condemned of capital offenses,[200] like first-degree murder, murder with special circumstances, treason, or genocide.[200][201] Because capital offenses are criminal cases, the state court systems are responsible to hear the majority of them. The Supreme Court and state courts' discretion in keeping the death penalty option are separate for the most part, if not appealed to the Supreme Court. According to the Legal Information Institute, “ it is not necessary that the actual punishment imposed was the death penalty, but rather a capital office is classified as such if the permissible punishment prescribed by the legislature for the offense is the death penalty.” [201] After Roper v. Simmons in 2005, the federal court deemed if the defendant was under 18 years old at the time of the crime, they can not be sentenced to death because it violates the 8th Amendment.[202]

George Stinney Jr.

In 1944, 14-year-old African-American George Stinney Jr. was convicted of murdering two white girls. He was the youngest person in the United States to be sentenced to death.[203] Stinney was executed by electrocution within 80 days of the murders. In 2014, Stinney's convictions were vacated and he was exonerated on the grounds that his 6th amendment rights had been violated. It was found Stinney's interrogation had included coercion, and an absence of counsel and of parental guidance.[203] Police said that Stinney had confessed, but no signed confession was ever produced.[204] The Judge who overturned the conviction wrote that: “Stinney’s appointed counsel made no independent investigation, did not request a change of venue or additional time to prepare the case, he asked little or no questions on cross-examination of the State’s witnesses and presented few or no witnesses on behalf of his client based on the length of trial. He failed to file an appeal or a stay of execution.” Stinney's sister said in a 2009 affidavit that she was with Stinney on the day of the murders, but she was never called to testify during thr trial.[204]

Exonerated Five

The systemic issue of biased investigation conduct is also seen in the Exonerated Five case. The Exonerated Five are made up of four black youths, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise.[205] They are formerly known as the Central Park Five and the Jogger Case. The boys received mixed convictions for assault, robbery, riot, rape, sexual abuse, and attempted murder of a white woman in 1990.[205]

The boys faced intense, un-recorded interrogations for at least seven hours in the absence of legal counsel, with video confessions following, beside Salaam.[205] Wise additionally had no parent present during questioning and confessing.[205] The five youths later pleaded not guilty and recanted their statements because they were produced under intimidation.[205] Despite no DNA evidence linking any of the boys to the crime scene, they were sentenced to 5 to 15 years.[205] After 12 years, the sole perpetrator, Matias Reyes, confessed to the crime while providing a DNA match to the only DNA selection found at the scene.[206] Their false confessions were recognized for inconsistencies and their convictions were vacated in December 2002.[207] They later sued the state and the city for reparations and received approximately $44 million in a settlement.[208]

 
"The full-page advertisement was taken out by Trump in the May 1, 1989, issue of the Daily News."[209] Donald Trump spent $85,000 in submitting the ad across four New York City newspapers.[209]

During the 1990 trial, former president Donald Trump (a real-estate character at the time) bought full-page ads voicing his reaction to the Central Park case.[205] In the ad, Donald Trump says the following:

“I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”[210][209]

The youths ranged from the ages of 14–16 years when the ad was released. In an archival interview with Larry King, Trump feels his belief is a common feeling because he received 15,000 letters of praise following the ad.[211] In retrospect, Salaam reflects in an 2021 interview with PBS MetroFocus, saying:

“I look at what Donald Trump as being the nails that sealed us in the coffin. And then what happened after that, they published our names, our addresses, and phone numbers in the New York City newspapers. When you think about Donald Trump’s ad, it was a whisper into society to have someone come to our homes to drag us from our beds, and to do to us what they had done to Emmett Till.” [212]

Because the youths were minors, their identities were supposed to remain confidential. Salaam shares that his family received an insurgence of death threats following Trump's advertisement, culminating in a climate of aggressive hate. A Central Park Five representative comments that Trump's ad influenced public opinion, possibly further tainting the impartiality of potential jurors "who [already], had a natural affinity for the victim."[209]

As of 2019, Donald Trump has refused to apologize and retract his statements despite the exoneration of the men.[213]

Lena Baker

Lena Baker was a Black woman who was wrongfully convicted of the murder of her abuser in 1945.[214] In Georgia, Baker served as a maid for a handicapped white man; she faced regular sexual and physical abuse from him.[214] Despite the town terrorizing Baker to leave the relationship, her abuser would equally threaten her with violence if she ever left.[214][215] Weeks before his death, he started holding Baker prisoner in his gristmill for numerous days.[214] Baker was able to escape the mill, but when she came back, her abuser threatened her with an iron bar.[214] After a struggle, Baker took ahold of his pistol and shot the man in self-defense.[215]

The all-white, all-male jury did not empathize with Baker's case of self-defense as a survivor of his slave-like conditions, including sexual and physical abuse.[216] In less than a day, the jury found Baker guilty of capital murder, which happened to result in a mandatory death sentence in Georgia at the time.[216] After failed appeals, reviews, and the abandonment of her legal representation, Lena Baker was executed by electrocution in 1945.[216] About 60 years following Baker's death, her family, with the help of the Prison and Jail Project, requested a posthumous pardon.[217] Their efforts succeeded in 2005 when Baker was granted a full and unconditional pardon from the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles because there was a lack of evidence to demonstrate Baker's intent to kill.[217] If the justice system had been careful with the evidence, they would have noted Baker's conviction did not qualify as capital murder and should have resulted in a sentence other than the death penalty.

Between sexes

As of May 20, 2021, the Death Penalty Information Center reports that there are 51 women on death row. 17 women have been executed since 1976,[218] compared to 1,516 men during the same time period.[219]

Since 1608, 15,391 lawful executions are confirmed to have been carried out in jurisdictions of, or now of, the United States, of these, 575, or 3.6%, were women. Women account for 150 death sentences, 167 people on death row, and 1100 people whose executions are actually carried out. While always comparatively rare, women are significantly less likely to be executed in the modern era than in the past. Of the 16 women executed on the state level, most took place in either Texas (6), Oklahoma (3) or Florida (2) and were demographically, 25% (4) African-American, with the rest (12) being white of any ethnicity. Historically, the states that have executed the most women are California, Texas and Florida, though unlike Texas and Florida, California has not executed a woman in the post-Furman era. The racial breakdown of women sentenced to death is 61% white, 21% black, 13% Latina, 3% Asian, and 2% American Indian.[218]

Methods

 
Usage of lethal injection in the US:
  State uses only this method.
  State uses this method primarily but also has other methods.
  State once used this method, but does not now.
  State once adopted this method, but dropped before its use.
  State has never adopted this method.
 
Firing squad usage in the United States:
  State uses this as a secondary method.
  State once used this method, but no longer does.
  State has never used this method.
  State has considered using a firing squad.
 
Number of executions each year by the method used in the United States and the earlier colonies from 1608 to 2004. The adoption of electrocution caused a marked drop off in the number of hangings, which was used even less with the use of gas inhalation. After Gregg v. Georgia, most states changed to lethal injection, leading to its rise.

All 27 states with the death penalty for murder provide lethal injection as the primary method of execution. Vermont's remaining death penalty statute for treason provides electrocution as the method of execution.[78][failed verification]

Some states allow other methods than lethal injection, but only as secondary methods to be used merely at the request of the prisoner, or if lethal injection is unavailable due to an inability to procure the necessary drugs or due to court challenges to lethal injection's constitutionality.[220][221]

Several states continue to use the historical three-drug protocol: firstly an anesthetic, secondly pancuronium bromide, a paralytic, and finally potassium chloride to stop the heart.[222] Eight states have used a single-drug protocol, inflicting only an overdose of a single anesthetic to the prisoner.[222]

While some state statutes specify the drugs required, a majority do not, giving more flexibility to prison officers.[222]

Pressures from anti-death penalty activists and shareholders have made it difficult for correctional services to get the chemicals. Hospira, the only U.S. manufacturer of sodium thiopental, stopped making the drug in 2011.[223] In 2016, it was reported that more than 20 U.S. and European drug manufacturers including Pfizer (the owner of Hospira) had taken steps to prevent their drugs from being used for lethal injections.[223][224][225]

Since then, some states have used other anesthetics, such as pentobarbital, etomidate,[226] or fast-acting benzodiazepines or sedatives like midazolam.[227] Many states have since bought lethal injection drugs from foreign furnishers, and most states have made it a criminal offense to reveal the identities of furnishers or execution team members.[223][228] In November 2015, California adopted regulations allowing the state to use its own public compounding pharmacies to make the chemicals.[229]

In 2009, Ohio approved the use of an intramuscular injection of 500 mg of hydromorphone (a 333-fold lethal overdose for an opioid-naive person)[230] and a supratherapeutic dose of midazolam as a backup means of carrying out executions when a suitable vein cannot be found for intravenous injection.[231][232]

Lethal injection was held to be a constitutional method of execution by the U.S. Supreme Court in three cases: Baze v. Rees (2008), Glossip v. Gross (2015), and Bucklew v. Precythe (2019).[233][234]

Offender-selected methods

In the following states, death row inmates with an execution warrant may always choose to be executed by:[221]

In four states an alternate method (firing squad in Utah, lethal gas in Arizona, and electrocution in Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee) is offered only to inmates sentenced to death for crimes committed prior to a specified date (usually when the state switched from the earlier method to lethal injection). The alternate method will be used for all inmates if lethal injection would be declared unconstitutional.

In five states, an alternate method is used only if lethal injection would be declared unconstitutional (electrocution in Arkansas; nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution, or firing squad in Mississippi and Oklahoma; firing squad in Utah; lethal gas in Wyoming).

In Alabama, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, "any constitutional method" is possible if all the other methods are declared unconstitutional.

In the state that abolished death penalty or where its statute was declared unconstitutional, people sentenced to death for a crime before the date of the abolition may retroactively be subjected to death penalty. Those states' methods are:

  • lethal injection in Colorado
  • lethal injection in Delaware unless the offense was committed before 1986, in which case the inmate could choose between lethal injection and hanging
  • lethal injection in New Hampshire, unless this method is "impratical", in which case hanging would be the method
  • lethal injection or electrocution in Virginia
  • lethal injection or hanging in Washington

When an offender chooses to be executed by a means different from the state's default method, which is always lethal injection, he/she loses the right to challenge its constitutionality in court. See Stewart v. LaGrand, 526 U.S. 115 (1999).

The most recent executions by methods other than injection are as follows (all chosen by the inmate):

Method Date State Inmate
Electrocution 20 February 2020 Tennessee Nicholas Todd Sutton
Firing squad 18 June 2010 Utah Ronnie Lee Gardner
Gas chamber 3 March 1999 Arizona Walter Bernhard LaGrand
Hanging 25 January 1996 Delaware Billy Bailey

Backup methods

Depending on the state, the following alternative methods are statutorily provided in case lethal injection is either found unconstitutional by a court or unavailable for practical reasons:[220][221][235]

  • Electrocution in Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky,[236] Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee.
  • Lethal gas in Alabama, California, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma and Wyoming.
  • Firing squad in Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah.
  • Hanging in New Hampshire (where repeal of the death penalty in 2019 is not retroactive).

Several states including Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah, have added back-up methods recently (or have expanded their application fields) in reaction to the shortage of lethal injection drugs.[221][237]

Oklahoma and Mississippi are the only states allowing more than two methods of execution in their statutes, providing lethal injection, nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution and firing squad to be used in that order if all earlier methods are unavailable. The nitrogen option was added by the Oklahoma Legislature in 2015 and has never been used in a judicial execution.[238] After struggling for years to design a nitrogen execution protocol and to obtain a proper device for it, Oklahoma announced in February 2020 it abandoned the project after finding a new reliable source of lethal injection drugs.[239]

Some states such as Florida have a larger provision dealing with execution methods unavailability, requiring their state departments of corrections to use "any constitutional method" if both lethal injection and electrocution are found unconstitutional. This was designed to make unnecessary any further legislative intervention in that event, but the provision applies only to legal (not practical) infeasibility.[240][241]

In March 2018, Alabama became the third state (after Oklahoma and Mississippi), to authorize the use of nitrogen asphyxiation as a method of execution.[242]

Federal executions

The method of execution of federal prisoners for offenses under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 is that of the state in which the conviction took place. If the state has no death penalty, the judge must choose a state with the death penalty for carrying out the execution.

The federal government has a facility (at U.S. Penitentiary Terre Haute) and regulations only for executions by lethal injection, but the United States Code allows U.S. Marshals to use state facilities and employees for federal executions.[243][244]

Execution attendance

 
The over 200 witnesses to the execution of Timothy McVeigh were mostly survivors and victims' relatives of the Oklahoma City bombing.

The last public execution in the U.S. was that of Rainey Bethea in Owensboro, Kentucky, on August 14, 1936.

It was the last execution in the nation at which the general public was permitted to attend without any legally imposed restrictions. "Public execution" is a legal phrase, defined by the laws of various states, and carried out pursuant to a court order. Similar to "public record" or "public meeting", it means that anyone who wants to attend the execution may do so.

Around 1890, a political movement developed in the United States to mandate private executions. Several states enacted laws which required executions to be conducted within a "wall" or "enclosure", or to "exclude public view". Most state laws currently use such explicit wording to prohibit public executions, while others do so only implicitly by enumerating the only authorized witnesses.[245]

All states allow news reporters to be execution witnesses for information of the general public, except Wyoming which allows only witnesses authorized by the condemned.[246][247][248] Several states also allow victims' families and relatives selected by the prisoner to watch executions. An hour or two before the execution, the condemned is offered religious services and to choose their last meal (except in Texas which abolished it in 2011).

The execution of Timothy McVeigh on June 11, 2001, was witnessed by over 200 people, most by closed-circuit television. Most were survivors, or relatives of victims of, the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, for which McVeigh had been sentenced to death.

Public opinion

Gallup, Inc. has monitored support for the death penalty in the United States since 1937 by asking "Are you in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder?" Gallup surveys documented a sharp increase in support for capital punishment between 1966 and 1994.[249] However, perhaps as the result of DNA exonerations of death row inmates reported in the national media in the late 1990s,[250] support began to wane, falling from 80% in 1994 to 56% in 2019. Moreover, approval varies substantially depending on the characteristics of the target and the alternatives posed, with much lower support for putting juveniles and the mentally ill to death (26% and 19%, respectively, in 2002).[249] Given the fact that attitudes toward capital punishment are often responsive to events, to characteristics of the target and to alternatives, many believe that the conventional wisdom—that death penalty attitudes are impervious to change—is flawed. Accordingly, any analysis of death penalty attitudes must account for the responsiveness of such attitudes, as well as their reputed resistance to change.[251]

Pew Research polls have demonstrated declining American support for the death penalty: 80% in 1974, 78% in 1996, 55% in 2014, and 49% in 2016.[252][253] The 2014 poll showed significant differences by race: 63% of whites, 40% of Hispanics and 36% of blacks, respectively, supported the death penalty in that year. However, in 2018, Pew's polls showed public support for the death penalty had increased to 54% from 49%. Since 2016, opinions among Republicans and Democrats have changed little, but the share of independents favoring the death penalty has increased by eight percentage points (from 44% to 52%).[254]

A 2010 poll by Lake Research Partners found that 61% of voters would choose a penalty other than the death sentence for murder.[255] When persons surveyed are given a choice between the death penalty and life without parole for persons convicted of capital crimes, support for execution has traditionally been significantly lower than in polling that asks only if a person does or does not support the death penalty. In Gallup's 2019 survey, support for the sentence of life without parole surpassed that for the death penalty by a margin of 60% to 36%.[249]

A 2014 study found that the belief that the death penalty helps victims' families to heal may be wrong; more often than finding closure, victims' families felt anger and wanted revenge, with potential side effects of depression, PTSD and a decreased satisfaction with life. Furthermore, the researchers found that a sense of compassion or remorse expressed from the perpetrator to the victim's family had a statistically significant positive effect on the family's ability to find closure.[256]

In November 2009, another Gallup poll found that 77% of Americans believed that the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, should receive the death penalty if convicted, 12 points higher than the rate of general support for the death penalty upon Gallup's most recent poll at the time.[257] A similar result was found in 2001 when respondents were polled about the execution of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.[258]

Debate

Capital punishment is a controversial issue, with many prominent organizations and individuals participating in the debate. Amnesty International and other groups oppose capital punishment on moral grounds.

Some law enforcement organizations, and some victims' rights groups support capital punishment.

The United States is one of the four developed countries that still practice capital punishment, along with Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan.

Religious groups are widely split on the issue of capital punishment.[259] The Fiqh Council of North America, a group of highly influential Muslim scholars in the United States, has issued a fatwa calling for a moratorium on capital punishment in the United States until various preconditions in the legal system are met.[260]

Reform Judaism has formally opposed the death penalty since 1959, when the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union for Reform Judaism) resolved "that in the light of modern scientific knowledge and concepts of humanity, the resort to or continuation of capital punishment either by a state or by the national government is no longer morally justifiable." The resolution goes on to say that the death penalty "lies as a stain upon civilization and our religious conscience." In 1979, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional arm of the Reform rabbinate, resolved that, "both in concept and in practice, Jewish tradition found capital punishment repugnant" and there is no persuasive evidence "that capital punishment serves as a deterrent to crime."[261]

In October 2009, the American Law Institute voted to disavow the framework for capital punishment that it had created in 1962, as part of the Model Penal Code, "in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment". A study commissioned by the institute had said that experience had proved that the goal of individualized decisions about who should be executed and the goal of systemic fairness for minorities and others could not be reconciled.[262] As of 2017, 159 prisoners have been exonerated due to evidence of their innocence.[18][255][263]

Advocates of the death penalty say that it deters crime, is a good tool for prosecutors in plea bargaining,[264] improves the community by eliminating recidivism by executed criminals, provides "closure" to surviving victims or loved ones, and is a just penalty. Some advocates[who?] against the death penalty argue that "most of the rest of the world gave up on human sacrifice a long time ago."[265]

The murder rate is highest in the South (6.5 per 100,000 in 2016), where 80% of executions are carried out, and lowest in the Northeast (3.5 per 100,000), with less than 1% of executions. A report by the US National Research Council in 2012 stated that studies claiming a deterrent effect are "fundamentally flawed" and should not be used for policy decisions.[255] According to a survey of the former and present presidents of the country's top academic criminological societies, 88% of these experts rejected the notion that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder.[255]

Data shows that the application of the death penalty is strongly influenced by racial bias.[255] Furthermore, some opponents argue that it is applied in an arbitrary manner by a criminal justice system that has been shown to be biased through the systemic influence of socio-economic, geographic, and gender factors.[266] Another argument in the capital punishment debate is the cost.[255][267]

Opponents to the death penalty note that the lethal injection, the most common method of carrying out the death penalty, can oftentimes cause executed individuals to remain conscious for several minutes after administering the injection, causing them to feel severe pain in their veins.[268] The "three drug cocktail" consists of midazolam, a sedative, vecuronium bromide, a paralytic, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart.[269] Opponents note that the midazolam in particular may mask the executed individual's pain and suffering.[270] Opponents argue that this causes unnecessary pain and suffering on the executed individual and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[270]

Additionally, in 2021–22, states such as South Carolina have experienced a shortage of the drugs used to make the lethal cocktail and some inmates have had to choose between death by electric chair or death by firing squad (aiming for the heart).[271] Critics note that these other methods are more likely to induce pain in the inmate during execution[272] and that these methods of execution have a high risk of being botched.[273]

Botched executions

One of the main arguments against the use of capital punishment in the United States is that there has been a long history of botched executions. University of Colorado Boulder Professor Michael L. Radelet described a "botched execution" as an execution that causes the prisoner to suffer for a long period of time before they die.[274] This has led to the argument that capital punishment is per se cruel and unusual punishment. The following is a short list of examples of botched executions that have occurred in the United States.

  • William Kemmler was the first person executed in the electric chair, in 1890. After being pronounced dead after 17 seconds, he was found to be still alive. The current was applied a second time, for two minutes, to complete the death.[275]
  • In Arizona, it took Joseph Wood two hours to die after being injected.[276]
  • In Alabama, the execution of Doyle Hamm was called off after prison medical staff spent nearly three hours attempting to insert an IV that could be used to administer the lethal injection drugs. In the process, the execution team punctured Hamm's bladder and femoral artery, causing significant bleeding.[277][278]
  • In Florida, Jesse Joseph Tafero had flames burst from his hair during an electrocution.[279]
  • Wallace Wilkerson died after 27 minutes in pain after the firing squad failed to shoot him in the heart.[280] Because of this, the constitutionality of the use of the firing squad was questioned. The Supreme Court of the United States affirmed that the firing squad did not violate the Eighth Amendment in the case Wilkerson v. Utah (1879).[281]
  • In New Mexico, Thomas Ketchum was decapitated when his body fell through the trap door during his hanging.[282]
  • In Mississippi, Jimmy Lee Gray died after being in the gas chamber for nine minutes. During the procedure, Gray thrashed and banged his head against the metal pole behind his head while struggling to breathe.[283]

Austin Sarat, a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, in his book Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty, found that from 1890 to 2010, 276 executions were botched out of a total of 8,776, or 3.15%, with lethal injections having the highest rate. Sarat writes that between 1980 and 2010 the rate of botched executions was higher than ever: 8.53 percent.[279] Death penalty experts found that 36.8% of all executions attempted or completed in 2022 (all lethal injections) were botched.[284]

Clemency and commutations

In states with the death penalty, the governor usually has the discretionary power to commute a death sentence or to stay its execution. In some states the governor is required to receive an advisory or binding recommendation from a separate board. In a few states like Georgia, the board decides alone on clemency. At the federal level, the power of clemency belongs to the President of the United States.[285]

The largest number of clemencies was granted in January 2003 in Illinois when outgoing Governor George Ryan, who had already imposed a moratorium on executions, pardoned four death-row inmates and commuted the sentences of the remaining 167 to life in prison without the possibility of parole.[286] When Governor Pat Quinn signed legislation abolishing the death penalty in Illinois in March 2011, he commuted the sentences of the fifteen inmates on death row to life imprisonment.[55]

Previous post-Furman mass clemencies took place in 1986 in New Mexico, when Governor Toney Anaya commuted all death sentences because of his personal opposition to the death penalty. In 1991, outgoing Ohio Governor Dick Celeste commuted the sentences of eight prisoners, among them all four women on the state's death row. And during his two terms (1979–1987) as Florida's governor, Bob Graham, although a strong death penalty supporter who had overseen the first post-Furman involuntary execution as well as 15 others, agreed to commute the sentences of six people on the grounds of doubts about guilt or disproportionality.

On December 14, 2022, outgoing Oregon governor Kate Brown commuted the death sentences of all 17 inmates on Oregon's death row to life imprisonment without parole, citing the death penalty's status as "an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction [...] and never has been administered fairly and equitably" and calling it "wasteful of taxpayer dollars" while questioning its ability to function as a deterrence to crime.[287] Governor Brown also ordered the dismantling of Oregon's lethal injection chamber and death row. Prior, Oregon had an ongoing official moratorium set by prior governor John Kitzhaber in 2011 and had not carried out any executions since that of Douglas Franklin Wright in 1997; furthermore, in 2019, the Oregon State Senate amended the state's death penalty statutes to significantly reduce the number of crimes that warranted the death penalty, thereby invalidating many of the state's active death sentences. In 2021, David Ray Bartol's death sentence was overturned on the grounds of it being a "disproportionate punishment" in violation of Oregon's state constitution, which death penalty experts and abolitionist advocates said would provide the rationale for the eventual overturning of every other death sentence in Oregon. Brown is the third Oregon governor to commute every standing death sentence in the state, after Governor Robert D. Holmes, who commuted every death sentence passed during his tenure from 1957 to 1959, and Governor Mark Hatfield, who commuted every death sentence in the state after Oregon temporarily abolished the death penalty in accordance with a statewide vote in 1964.[288][287]

Moratoria and reviews on executions

All executions were suspended through the country between September 2007 and April 2008. At that time, the United States Supreme Court was examining the constitutionality of lethal injection in Baze v. Rees. This was the longest period with no executions in the United States since 1982. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld this method in a 7–2 ruling.

In addition to the states that have no valid death penalty statute, the following 17 states and 3 jurisdictions either have an official moratorium on executions or have had no executions for more than ten years as of 2023:

State / jurisdiction Status Moratorium and/or review status[289]
Federal Government by Attorney General In 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland set a moratorium pending review.[290]
Military de facto No executions since 1961.
American Samoa de facto No method of execution defined by law. No executions since gaining self-governance in 1949. There are currently no prisoners under a sentence of death in the territory.
Arizona by Governor and Attorney General In January 2023, Governor Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Kris Mayes halted executions for a review of state's executions process after three botched executions in 2022.[291]
California by Governor and court order On March 13, 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom set a moratorium. There has also been a court ordered moratorium on executions in effect since December 15, 2006.[292][293]
Idaho de facto No executions since 2012.
Indiana de facto No executions since 2009 (excluding federal executions at USP Terre Haute).
Kansas de facto Kansas has had no executions since 1965. Kansas restored the death penalty in 1994 but no current death row inmates have exhausted their appeals.
Kentucky by court order In 2009, a state judge suspended executions pending a new protocol.[294][295]
Louisiana de facto No executions since 2010. (no involuntary executions since 2002)
Montana by court order In 2015, a state judge ruled the state's lethal injection protocol is unlawful, stopping executions.[296]
Nevada de facto No executions since 2006.
North Carolina by implementers Executions are suspended following a decision by the state's medical board that physicians cannot participate in executions, which is a requirement under state law.
Ohio de facto In 2020, Governor Mike DeWine set an informal moratorium. The state will no longer use lethal injection, but state law does not currently specify any other method of execution.
Oregon by Governor In 2011, Governor John Kitzhaber set a moratorium and a review.[297]
Pennsylvania by Governor In 2015, Governor Tom Wolf set a moratorium pending review.[298]
South Carolina de facto No executions since 2011.
Tennessee by Governor On May 2, 2022, Governor Bill Lee set a moratorium on all executions in Tennessee that were scheduled to be executed in 2022.[299]
Utah de facto No executions since 2010.
Wyoming de facto Wyoming has had no executions since 1992. There are currently no prisoners under a sentence of death in the state.

Since 1976, four states have only executed condemned prisoners who voluntarily waived any further appeals: Pennsylvania has executed three inmates, Oregon two, Connecticut one, and New Mexico one. In the last state, Governor Toney Anaya commuted the sentences of all five condemned prisoners on death row in late 1986.[300]

In California, United States District Judge Jeremy Fogel suspended all executions in the state on December 15, 2006, ruling that the implementation used in California was unconstitutional but that it could be fixed.[301] California Governor Gavin Newsom declared an indefinite moratorium on March 13, 2019; he also ordered the closure and dismantling of the death chamber. In 2023, Governor Newsom ordered the relocation of death row inmates out of death row and to different prisons across the country "to phase out the practice of segregating people on death row based solely on their sentence," although no inmates were offered commutations or re-sentencing hearings related to these developments. Relocated death row inmates who obtained jobs in prison would have 70 percent of their earnings sent to their victims' families.[302][303]

The CDCR says the move allows the state "to phase out the practice of segregating people on death row based solely on their sentence." No inmates will be re-sentenced and no death row commutations offered, officials say.

On November 25, 2009, the Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed a decision by the Franklin County Circuit Court suspending executions until the state adopts regulations for carrying out the penalty by lethal injection.[295]

In November 2011, Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber announced a moratorium on executions in Oregon, canceling a planned execution and ordering a review of the death penalty system in the state.[297]

On February 13, 2015, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf announced a moratorium on the death penalty. Wolf will issue a reprieve for every execution until a commission on capital punishment, which was established in 2011 by the Pennsylvania State Senate, produces a recommendation.[298] The state had not executed anyone since Gary M. Heidnik in 1999.

On July 25, 2019, U.S. Attorney General William Barr announced that the federal government would resume executions using pentobarbital, rather than the three-drug cocktail previously used. Five convicted death row inmates were scheduled to be executed in December 2019 and January 2020.[304] On November 20, 2019, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan issued a preliminary injunction preventing the resumption of federal executions. Plaintiffs in the case argued that the use of pentobarbital may violate the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994.[305] The stay was lifted in June 2020 and four executions were rescheduled for July and August 2020.[96] On July 14, 2020, Daniel Lewis Lee was executed. He became the first convict executed by the federal government since 2003.[20] Overall, thirteen federal prisoners were executed during the presidency of Donald Trump between July 2020 and January 2021. The last convict executed was Dustin Higgs on January 16, 2021. On July 1, 2021, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland halted all federal executions pending review of the changes made under the Trump administration.[290]

See also

Explanatory notes

  1. ^ Map only displays the status of the death penalty for crimes committed in the present and future. Some abolitionist states may still allow one to be sentenced to death for crimes committed before the abolition of the capital punishment in that state, and may still have inmates on death row who at the time of abolition did not have their sentences commuted.
  2. ^ Although capital punishment is, in theory, a legal punishment, there are currently no statutes that govern the execution of a sentence of death, resulting in a situation where life imprisonment is the de facto highest punishment in American Samoa.

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This article is about an overview of capital punishment amongst all jurisdictions in the United States For capital punishment by the federal government see Capital punishment by the United States federal government In the United States capital punishment is a legal penalty throughout the country at the federal level in 27 states and in American Samoa b 1 It is also a legal penalty for some military offenses Capital punishment has been abolished in 23 states and in the federal capital Washington D C 2 It is usually applied for only the most serious crimes like aggravated murder Although it is a legal penalty in 27 states 20 states have the ability to execute death sentences with the other seven as well as the federal government being subject to different types of moratoriums The existence of capital punishment in the United States can be traced to early colonial Virginia 3 Along with Japan Singapore and Taiwan the United States is one of four advanced democracies and the only Western nation that applies the death penalty regularly 4 5 6 7 8 It is one of 54 countries worldwide applying it and was the first to develop lethal injection as a method of execution which has since been adopted by five other countries 9 The Philippines has since abolished executions and Guatemala has done so for civil offenses leaving the United States as one of four countries to still use this method along with China Thailand and Vietnam It is common practice for the condemned to be administered sedatives prior to execution regardless of the method used 10 11 12 Without the death penalty Capital punishment repealed never instituted or struck down as unconstitutional 23 states 5 territories a With the death penalty Capital punishment in statute but executions formally suspended 7 states Capital punishment in statute but no executions within the last 10 years 8 states 1 territory Capital punishment in statute but executions informally suspended 1 state Executions carried out within the last 10 years and capital punishment currently in statute 11 states Map displaying the status of capital punishment since 1970 by jurisdiction Capital punishment abolished or struck down Capital punishment is a legal penalty 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 at the time 13 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 8 700 defendants have been sentenced to death 14 of these more than 1 550 have been executed 15 16 At least 190 people who were sentenced to death since 1972 have since been exonerated about 2 2 or one in 46 17 18 As of April 13 2022 about 2 400 to 2 500 convicts are still on the death row 19 The Trump administration s Department of Justice announced its plans to resume executions for federal crimes in 2019 On July 14 2020 Daniel Lewis Lee became the first inmate executed by the federal government since 2003 20 As of January 2022 update there were 44 inmates on federal death row 21 Thirteen federal death row inmates have been executed since federal executions resumed in July 2020 The last and most recent federal execution was of Dustin Higgs who was executed on January 16 2021 Higgs execution was also the last under the presidency of Donald Trump 22 On July 1 2021 Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that a moratorium on the federal death penalty was being reinstated 23 The Human Rights Measurement Initiative gives the US a score of 5 6 out of 10 for the right to freedom from the death penalty 24 Contents 1 History 1 1 Pre Furman history 1 2 Early abolition movement 1 3 Constitutional law developments 1 4 Capital punishment suspended 1972 1 5 Capital punishment reinstated 1976 1 6 Supreme Court narrows capital offenses 1 7 Repeal movements and legal challenges 1 7 1 States that have abolished the death penalty 1 8 Modern era 1 9 Women s history and capital punishment 1 10 Juvenile capital punishment 1 11 Execution statistics 2 Capital crimes 2 1 Aggravated murder 2 1 1 Aggravating factors in federal court 2 2 Crimes against the state 3 Legal process 3 1 Decision to seek the death penalty 3 2 Sentencing 3 3 Direct review 3 4 State collateral review 3 5 Federal habeas corpus 3 6 Section 1983 3 7 Execution warrant 4 Distribution of sentences 4 1 Among states 4 2 Among races 4 2 1 Statistics 4 2 2 Organizations against the death penalty for racial equity 4 2 2 1 ACLU s Capital Punishment Project 4 2 2 2 Equal Justice USA 4 2 3 Black Americans and capital punishment 4 2 3 1 Racial relationship between lynchings and capital punishment 4 2 3 2 Racial breakdown of sentences by state 4 2 3 2 1 Top five states with the highest rates of execution per capita 4 2 3 2 2 Texas 4 2 3 2 3 Oklahoma 4 2 3 2 4 Alabama 4 2 3 2 5 Virginia 4 2 3 3 Exonerations 4 2 3 4 Cases 4 2 3 4 1 George Stinney Jr 4 2 3 4 2 Exonerated Five 4 2 3 4 3 Lena Baker 4 3 Between sexes 5 Methods 5 1 Offender selected methods 5 2 Backup methods 5 3 Federal executions 6 Execution attendance 7 Public opinion 8 Debate 8 1 Botched executions 9 Clemency and commutations 10 Moratoria and reviews on executions 11 See also 12 Explanatory notes 13 References 13 1 Citations 13 2 General sources 14 Further reading 14 1 Books 14 2 Journal articles 15 External linksHistory EditPre Furman history Edit Executions in the United States from 1608 to 2020The first recorded death sentence in the British North American colonies was carried out in 1608 on Captain George Kendall 25 who was executed by firing squad 26 at the Jamestown colony for spying on behalf of the Spanish government 27 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 28 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 29 The Fourteenth Amendment adopted in 1868 also requires a due process of law for deprivation of life by any states The Espy file 30 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 U S about two thirds of them in the first 20 years 31 Additionally the United States Army executed 135 soldiers between 1916 and 1961 the most recent 32 33 34 Early abolition movement Edit This section needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this section Unsourced material may be challenged and removed Find sources Capital punishment in the United States news newspapers books scholar JSTOR October 2021 Learn how and when to remove this template message Three states abolished the death penalty for murder during the 19th century Michigan which has never executed a prisoner since achieving statehood and which is the first government in the English speaking world to abolish capital punishment 35 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 theoretically 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 36 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 Edit Capital punishment was used by 6 of 50 states in 2022 They were Alabama Arizona Mississippi Missouri Oklahoma and Texas 37 Government executions as reported by Amnesty International took place in 20 of the world s 195 countries The Federal government however which had not executed for 16 years prior did so in 2020 pushed by 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 beginning of the 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 38 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 Edit Further information Furman v GeorgiaIn 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 13 The next day columnist Barry Schweid wrote that it was unlikely that the death penalty could exist anymore in the United States 39 Capital punishment reinstated 1976 Edit Further information Gregg v Georgia and Capital punishment in Georgia U S state U S Supreme Court Washington D C Instead of abandoning capital punishment 37 states enacted new death penalty statutes that attempted to address the concerns of White and Stewart in Furman Some states responded by enacting mandatory death penalty statutes which prescribed a sentence of death for anyone convicted of certain forms of murder White had hinted that such a scheme would meet his constitutional concerns in his Furman opinion Other states adopted bifurcated trial and sentencing procedures with various procedural limitations on the jury s ability to pronounce a death sentence designed to limit juror discretion On July 2 1976 the U S Supreme Court decided Gregg v Georgia 40 and upheld 7 2 a Georgia procedure in which the trial of capital crimes was bifurcated into guilt innocence and sentencing phases At the first proceeding the jury decides the defendant s guilt if the defendant is innocent or otherwise not convicted of first degree murder the death penalty will not be imposed At the second hearing the jury determines whether certain statutory aggravating factors exist whether any mitigating factors exist and in many jurisdictions weigh the aggravating and mitigating factors in assessing the ultimate penalty either death or life in prison either with or without parole The same day in Woodson v North Carolina 41 and Roberts v Louisiana 42 the court struck down 5 4 statutes providing a mandatory death sentence Executions resumed on January 17 1977 when Gary Gilmore went before a firing squad in Utah Although hundreds of individuals were sentenced to death in the United States during the 1970s and early 1980s only ten people besides Gilmore who had waived all of his appeal rights were actually executed prior to 1984 Following the decision the use of capital punishment in the United States soared 43 This was in contrast to trends in other parts of advanced industrial democracies where the use of capital punishment declined or was prohibited 43 Members of the Council of Europe comply with the European Convention of Human Rights which prohibits capital punishment The last execution in the UK took place in 1964 44 and in 1977 in France Supreme Court narrows capital offenses Edit See also Felony murder and the death penalty in the United States In 1977 the Supreme Court s Coker v Georgia decision barred the death penalty for rape of an adult woman Previously the death penalty for rape of an adult had been gradually phased out in the United States and at the time of the decision Georgia and the Federal government were the only two jurisdictions to still retain the death penalty for this offense In the 1980 case Godfrey v Georgia the U S Supreme Court ruled that murder can be punished by death only if it involves a narrow and precise aggravating factor 45 The U S Supreme Court has placed two major restrictions on the use of the death penalty First the case of Atkins v Virginia decided on June 20 2002 46 held that the execution of intellectually disabled inmates is unconstitutional Second in 2005 the court s decision in Roper v Simmons 47 struck down executions for offenders under the age of 18 at the time of the crime In the 2008 case Kennedy v Louisiana the court also held 5 4 that the death penalty is unconstitutional when applied to non homicidal crimes against the person including child rape Only two death row inmates both in Louisiana were affected by the decision 48 Nevertheless the ruling came less than five months before the 2008 presidential election and was criticized by both major party candidates Barack Obama and John McCain 49 Repeal movements and legal challenges Edit In 2004 New York s and Kansas capital sentencing schemes were struck down by their respective states highest courts Kansas successfully appealed the Kansas Supreme Court decision to the United States Supreme Court which reinstated the statute in Kansas v Marsh 2006 holding it did not violate the U S Constitution The decision of the New York Court of Appeals was based on the state constitution making unavailable any appeal The state lower house has since blocked all attempts to reinstate the death penalty by adopting a valid sentencing scheme 50 In 2016 Delaware s death penalty statute was also struck down by its state supreme court 51 In 2007 New Jersey became the first state to repeal the death penalty by legislative vote since Gregg v Georgia 52 followed by New Mexico in 2009 53 54 Illinois in 2011 55 Connecticut in 2012 56 57 and Maryland in 2013 58 The repeals were not retroactive but in New Jersey Illinois and Maryland governors commuted all death sentences after enacting the new law 59 In Connecticut the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that the repeal must be retroactive In New Mexico capital punishment for certain offenses is still possible for National Guard members in Title 32 status under the state s Code of Military Justice NMSA 20 12 and for capital offenses committed prior to the repeal of the state s death penalty statute 60 61 Nebraska s legislature also passed a repeal in 2015 but a referendum campaign gathered enough signatures to suspend it Capital punishment was reinstated by popular vote on November 8 2016 The same day California s electorate defeated a proposal to repeal the death penalty and adopted another initiative to speed up its appeal process 62 On October 11 2018 Washington state became the 20th state to abolish capital punishment when its state Supreme Court deemed the death penalty unconstitutional on the grounds of racial bias 63 The state later abolished it through legislation passed in 2023 64 New Hampshire became the 21st state to abolish capital punishment on May 30 2019 when its state senate overrode Governor Sununu s veto by a vote of 16 8 65 Colorado became the 22nd state to abolish capital punishment when governor Jared Polis signed a repeal bill on March 23 2020 and commuted all existing death sentences in the state to life without parole 66 Virginia became the 23rd state to abolish capital punishment and the first Southern state to do so when governor Ralph Northam signed a repeal bill on March 24 2021 and commuted all existing death sentences in the state to life without parole 67 68 Since Furman 11 states have organized popular votes dealing with the death penalty through the initiative and referendum process All resulted in a vote for reinstating it rejecting its abolition expanding its application field specifying in the state constitution that it is not unconstitutional or expediting the appeal process in capital cases 36 States that have abolished the death penalty Edit A total of 23 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have abolished the death penalty for all crimes Below is a table of the states and the date that the state abolished the death penalty 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 Michigan became the first English speaking territory in the world to abolish capital punishment in 1847 Although treason remained a crime punishable by the death penalty in Michigan despite the 1847 abolition no one was ever executed under that law and Michigan s 1962 Constitutional Convention codified that the death penalty was fully abolished 77 Vermont has abolished the death penalty for all crimes but has an invalid death penalty statue for treason 78 When it abolished the death penalty in 2019 New Hampshire explicitly did not commute the death sentence of the sole person remaining on the state s death row 79 80 Map displaying the status of capital punishment since 1970 by state States with the death penalty States without the death penaltyState District Territory Year Last executionAlaska 1957 1950Colorado 2020 1997Connecticut 2012 2005Delaware 2016 2012District of Columbia 1981 1957Hawaii 1957 1947Illinois 2011 1999Iowa 1965 1962Maine 1887 1885Maryland 2013 2005Massachusetts 1984 1947Michigan 1963 1837Minnesota 1911 1906New Hampshire 2019 1939New Jersey 2007 1963New Mexico 2009 2001New York 2007 1963North Dakota 1973 1905Rhode Island 1984 1845Puerto Rico 1929 1927Vermont 1972 1954Virginia 2021 2017Washington 2018 2010West Virginia 1965 1959Wisconsin 1853 1851Modern era Edit The lethal injection room in Florida State PrisonIn 1982 Texas carried out the first execution by lethal injection in world history and lethal injection subsequently became the preferred method throughout the country displacing the electric chair 81 From 1976 to 8 December 2016 there were 1 533 executions of which 1 349 were by lethal injection 163 by electrocution 11 by gas inhalation 3 by hanging and 3 by firing squad 82 The South had the great majority of these executions with 1 249 there were 190 in the Midwest 86 in the West and only 4 in the Northeast No state in the Northeast has conducted an execution since Connecticut now abolitionist in 2005 The state of Texas alone conducted 571 executions over 1 3 of the total the states of Texas Virginia now abolitionist and Oklahoma combined make up over half the total with 802 executions between them 83 17 executions have been conducted by the federal government 84 Executions increased in frequency until 1999 98 prisoners were executed that year Since 1999 the number of executions has greatly decreased and the 17 executions in 2020 were the fewest since 1991 15 A 2016 poll conducted by Pew Research found that support nationwide for the death penalty in the U S had fallen below 50 for the first time since the beginning of the post Gregg era 85 The death penalty became an issue during the 1988 presidential election It came up in the October 13 1988 debate between the two presidential nominees George H W Bush and Michael Dukakis when Bernard Shaw the moderator of the debate asked Dukakis Governor if Kitty Dukakis his wife were raped and murdered would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer Dukakis replied No I don t and I think you know that I ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life I don t see any evidence that it s a deterrent and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime Bush was elected and many including Dukakis himself cite the statement as the beginning of the end of his campaign 86 In 1996 Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act to streamline the appeal process in capital cases The bill was signed into law by President Bill Clinton who had endorsed capital punishment during his 1992 presidential campaign A study found that at least 34 of the 749 executions carried out in the U S between 1977 and 2001 or 4 5 involved unanticipated problems or delays that caused at least arguably unnecessary agony for the prisoner or that reflect gross incompetence of the executioner The rate of these botched executions remained steady over the period 87 A study published in The Lancet in 2005 found that in 43 of cases of lethal injection the blood level of hypnotics in the prisoner was insufficient to ensure unconsciousness 88 Nonetheless the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 Baze v Rees again in 2015 Glossip v Gross and a third time in 2019 Bucklew v Precythe that lethal injection does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment 89 90 On July 25 2019 Attorney General William Barr ordered the resumption of federal executions after a 16 year hiatus and set five execution dates for December 2019 and January 2020 91 92 93 94 After the Supreme Court upheld a stay on these executions 95 the stay was lifted in June 2020 and four executions were rescheduled for July and August 2020 96 The federal government executed Daniel Lewis Lee on July 14 2020 He became the first convict executed by the federal government since 2003 20 Before Trump s term ended in January 2021 the federal government carried out a total of 13 executions 97 Women s history and capital punishment Edit In 1632 24 years after the first recorded male execution in the colonies Jane Champion became the first woman known to have been lawfully executed She was sentenced to death by hanging after she was convicted of infanticide around two thirds of women executed in the 17th and early 18th centuries were convicted of child murder A married woman it is not known whether Champion s illicit lover William Gallopin also convicted of their child s murder was also executed although it appears he was so sentenced 98 99 For the Puritans infanticide was the worst form of murder 100 Women accounted for just one fifth of all executions between 1632 and 1759 in the colonial United States Women were more likely to be acquitted and the relatively low number of executions of women may have been impacted by the scarcity of female laborers Slavery was not yet widespread in the 17th century mainland and planters relied mostly on Irish indentured servants To maintain subsistence levels in those days everyone had to do farm work including women 98 The second half of the 17th century saw the executions of 14 women and 6 men who were accused of witchcraft during the witch hunt hysteria and the Salem Witch Trials While both men and women were executed 80 of the accusations were towards women so the list of executions disproportionately affected men by a margin of 6 actual to 4 expected i e 50 more men were executed than expected from the percentage of accused who were men 101 Other notable female executions include Mary Surratt Margie Velma Barfield and Wanda Jean Allen Mary Surratt was executed by hanging in 1865 after being convicted of co conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln 102 Margie Velma Barfield was convicted of murder and when she was executed by lethal injection in 1984 she became the first woman to be executed since the ban on capital punishment was lifted in 1976 103 Wanda Jean Allen was convicted of murder in 1989 and had a high profile execution by lethal injection in January 2001 She was the first black woman to be executed in the US since 1954 104 Allen s appellate lawyers did not deny her guilt but claimed that prosecutors capitalized on her low IQ race and homosexuality in their representations of her as a murderer at trial The tactic did not work 105 The federal government executes women infrequently Ethel Rosenberg convicted of espionage was executed in the electric chair on June 19 1953 and Bonnie Brown Heady convicted of kidnapping and murder was executed in the gas chamber later that same year on December 18 Since Heady only one more woman has been executed Lisa Montgomery convicted of killing a pregnant woman and cutting out and kidnapping her baby by lethal injection in Indiana on January 13 2021 Her execution had been stayed while her lawyers argued that she had mental health issues but the Supreme Court lifted the stay 106 107 Juvenile capital punishment Edit In 1642 the first ever juvenile Thomas Graunger was sentenced to death in Plymouth Colony Massachusetts for bestiality Since then at least 361 other juveniles have been sentenced to the death penalty citation needed Kent v United States 1966 turned the tides for juvenile capital punishment sentencing when it limited the waiver discretion juvenile courts had Before this case juvenile courts had the freedom to waiver juvenile cases to criminal courts without a hearing which did not make the waiving process consistent across states Discussions about abolishing the death penalty started occurring between 1983 and 1986 In 1987 Thompson v Oklahoma the Supreme Court threw away William Wayne Thompson s death sentence due to it being cruel and unusual punishment as he was 15 years old at the time of the crime he committed the judgment established that evolving standards of decency made it inappropriate to apply the death penalty for people under 16 years old at the time of their capital crime 108 although Thompson held that it was still constitutional to sentence juveniles 16 years or older to the death penalty It was not until Roper v Simmons that the juvenile death penalty was abolished due to the United States Supreme Court finding that the execution of juveniles is in conflict with the Eighth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment which deal with cruel and unusual punishment Prior to completely abolishing the juvenile death penalty in 2005 any juvenile aged 16 years or older could be sentenced to death in some states the last of whom was Scott Hain executed in Oklahoma in 2003 for burning two people to death in a robbery at age 17 109 Prior to Roper there were 71 people on death row in the United States for crimes committed as juveniles 110 Since 2005 there have been no executions nor discussion of executing juveniles in the United States Execution statistics Edit Number of executed people in the United States since 1977 Total withholding current year 1 558 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 19941 0 2 0 1 2 5 21 18 18 25 11 16 23 14 31 38 311995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 201256 45 74 68 98 85 66 71 65 59 60 53 42 37 52 46 43 432013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 202339 35 28 20 23 25 22 17 11 18 17 See also List of people scheduled to be executed in the United StatesCapital crimes EditAggravated murder Edit Aggravating factors for seeking capital punishment of murder vary greatly among death penalty states California has twenty two 111 Some aggravating circumstances are nearly universal such as robbery murder murder involving rape of the victim and murder of an on duty police officer 112 Several states have included child murder to their list of aggravating factors but the victim s age under which the murder is punishable by death varies In 2011 Texas raised this age from six to ten 113 In some states the high number of aggravating factors has been criticized on account of giving prosecutors too much discretion in choosing cases where they believe capital punishment is warranted In California especially an official commission proposed in 2008 to reduce these factors to five multiple murders torture murder murder of a police officer murder committed in jail and murder related to another felony 114 Columnist Charles Lane went further and proposed that murder related to a felony other than rape should no longer be a capital crime when there is only one victim killed 115 Aggravating factors in federal court Edit In order for a person to be eligible for a death sentence when convicted of aggravated first degree murder the jury or court when there is not a jury must determine at least one of sixteen aggravating factors that existed during the crime s commission The following is a list of the 16 aggravating factors under federal law 116 Murder while committing another felony 117 Offender was convicted of a separate felony involving a firearm prior to the aggravated murder Being convicted of a separate felony where death or life imprisonment was authorized prior to the aggravated murder Being convicted of any separate violent felony prior to the aggravated murder The offender put the lives of at least 1 or more other persons in danger of death during the commission of the crime Offender committed the crime in an especially cruel heinous or depraved manner Offender committed the crime for financial gain Offender committed the crime for monetary gain The murder was premeditated involved planning in order to be carried out or the offender showed early signs of committing the crime such as keeping a journal of the crime s details 118 and posting things on the Internet 119 Offender was previously convicted of at least two drug offenses The victim would not have been able to defend themselves while being attacked Offender was previously convicted of a federal drug offense Offender was involved in a long term business of selling drugs to minors A high ranking official was murdered such as the President of the United States the leader of another country or a police officer Offender was previously convicted of sexual assault or child rape During the crime s commission the offender killed or tried to kill multiple people 120 Crimes against the state Edit The opinion of the court in Kennedy v Louisiana says that the ruling does not apply to treason espionage terrorism and drug kingpin activity which are offenses against the State 121 Since no one is on death row for such offenses the court has yet to rule on the constitutionality of the death penalty applied for them Treason espionage and large scale drug trafficking are all capital crimes under federal law Treason is also punishable by death in six states Arkansas California Georgia Louisiana Mississippi and South Carolina Large scale drug trafficking is punishable by death in two states Florida and Missouri 122 and aircraft hijacking in two others Georgia and Mississippi Vermont has an invalidated pre Furman statute allowing the electric chair for treason despite abolishing capital punishment in 1965 123 Legal process EditThe legal administration of the death penalty in the United States typically involves five critical steps 1 prosecutorial decision to seek the death penalty 2 sentencing 3 direct review 4 state collateral review and 5 federal habeas corpus Clemency through which the Governor or President of the jurisdiction can unilaterally reduce or abrogate a death sentence is an executive rather than judicial process 124 Decision to seek the death penalty Edit While judges in criminal cases can usually impose a harsher prison sentence than the one demanded by prosecution the death penalty can be handed down only if the accuser has specifically decided to seek it In the decades since Furman new questions have emerged about whether or not prosecutorial arbitrariness has replaced sentencing arbitrariness A study by Pepperdine University School of Law published in Temple Law Review surveyed the decision making process among prosecutors in various states The authors found that prosecutors capital punishment filing decisions are marked by local idiosyncrasies and that wide prosecutorial discretion remains because of overly broad criteria California law for example has 22 special circumstances making nearly all first degree murders potential capital cases 125 A proposed remedy against prosecutorial arbitrariness is to transfer the prosecution of capital cases to the state attorney general 126 In 2017 Florida governor Rick Scott removed all capital cases from local prosecutor Aramis Ayala because she decided to never seek the death penalty no matter the gravity of the crime 127 Sentencing Edit Of the 27 states with the death penalty 25 require the sentence to be decided by the jury and 24 require a unanimous decision by the jury Two states do not use juries in death penalty cases In Nebraska the sentence is decided by a three judge panel which must unanimously agree on death and the defendant is sentenced to life imprisonment if one of the judges is opposed 128 Montana is the only state where the trial judge decides the sentence alone 129 The only state which does not require a unanimous jury decision is Alabama At least 10 jurors must concur and a retrial happens if the jury deadlocks 130 In all states in which the jury is involved only death qualified prospective jurors can be selected in such a jury to exclude both people who will always vote for the death sentence and those who are categorically opposed to it However the states differ on what happens if the penalty phase results in a hung jury 131 132 In four states Arizona California Kentucky and Nevada a retrial of the penalty phase will be conducted before a different jury the common law rule for mistrial 133 In two states Indiana and Missouri the judge will decide the sentence In the remaining states a hung jury results in a life sentence even if only one juror opposed death Federal law also provides that outcome The first outcome is referred as the true unanimity rule while the third has been criticized as the single juror veto rule 134 Direct review Edit If a defendant is sentenced to death at the trial level the case then goes into a direct review 135 The direct review process is a typical legal appeal An appellate court examines the record of evidence presented in the trial court and the law that the lower court applied and decides whether the decision was legally sound or not 136 Direct review of a capital sentencing hearing will result in one of three outcomes If the appellate court finds that no significant legal errors occurred in the capital sentencing hearing the appellate court will affirm the judgment or let the sentence stand 135 If the appellate court finds that significant legal errors did occur then it will reverse the judgment or nullify the sentence and order a new capital sentencing hearing 137 Lastly if the appellate court finds that no reasonable juror could find the defendant eligible for the death penalty a rarity then it will order the defendant acquitted or not guilty of the crime for which he she was given the death penalty and order him sentenced to the next most severe punishment for which the offense is eligible 137 About 60 percent survive the process of direct review intact 138 State collateral review Edit At times when a death sentence is affirmed on direct review supplemental methods to attack the judgment though less familiar than a typical appeal do remain These supplemental remedies are considered collateral review that is an avenue for upsetting judgments that have become otherwise final 139 Where the prisoner received his death sentence in a state level trial as is usually the case the first step in collateral review is state collateral review which is often called state habeas corpus If the case is a federal death penalty case it proceeds immediately from direct review to federal habeas corpus Although all states have some type of collateral review the process varies widely from state to state 140 Generally the purpose of these collateral proceedings is to permit the prisoner to challenge his sentence on grounds that could not have been raised reasonably at trial or on direct review 141 Most often these are claims such as ineffective assistance of counsel which requires the court to consider new evidence outside the original trial record something courts may not do in an ordinary appeal State collateral review though an important step in that it helps define the scope of subsequent review through federal habeas corpus is rarely successful in and of itself Only around 6 percent of death sentences are overturned on state collateral review 142 In Virginia state habeas corpus for condemned men are heard by the state supreme court under exclusive original jurisdiction since 1995 immediately after direct review by the same court 143 This avoids any proceeding before the lower courts and is in part why Virginia has the shortest time on average between death sentence and execution less than eight years and has executed 113 offenders since 1976 with only five remaining on death row as of June 2017 update 144 145 To reduce litigation delays other states require convicts to file their state collateral appeal before the completion of their direct appeal 146 or provide adjudication of direct and collateral attacks together in a unitary review 147 Federal habeas corpus Edit After a death sentence is affirmed in state collateral review the prisoner may file for federal habeas corpus which is a unique type of lawsuit that can be brought in federal courts Federal habeas corpus is a type of collateral review and it is the only way that state prisoners may attack a death sentence in federal court other than petitions for certiorari to the United States Supreme Court after both direct review and state collateral review The scope of federal habeas corpus is governed by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 AEDPA which restricted significantly its previous scope The purpose of federal habeas corpus is to ensure that state courts through the process of direct review and state collateral review have done a reasonable job in protecting the prisoner s federal constitutional rights Prisoners may also use federal habeas corpus suits to bring forth new evidence that they are innocent of the crime though to be a valid defense at this late stage in the process evidence of innocence must be truly compelling 148 According to Eric M Freedman 21 percent of death penalty cases are reversed through federal habeas corpus 142 James Liebman a professor of law at Columbia Law School stated in 1996 that his study found that when habeas corpus petitions in death penalty cases were traced from conviction to completion of the case there was a 40 percent success rate in all capital cases from 1978 to 1995 149 Similarly a study by Ronald Tabak in a law review article puts the success rate in habeas corpus cases involving death row inmates even higher finding that between 1976 and 1991 approximately 47 percent of the habeas petitions filed by death row inmates were granted 150 The different numbers are largely definitional rather than substantive Freedam s statistics looks at the percentage of all death penalty cases reversed while the others look only at cases not reversed prior to habeas corpus review A similar process is available for prisoners sentenced to death by the judgment of a federal court 151 The AEDPA also provides an expeditious habeas procedure in capital cases for states meeting several requirements set forth in it concerning counsel appointment for death row inmates 152 Under this program federal habeas corpus for condemned prisoners would be decided in about three years from affirmance of the sentence on state collateral review In 2006 Congress conferred the determination of whether a state fulfilled the requirements to the U S attorney general with a possible appeal of the state to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit As of March 2016 update the Department of Justice has still not granted any certifications 153 Section 1983 Edit If the federal court refuses to issue a writ of habeas corpus the death sentence ordinarily becomes final for all purposes In recent times however prisoners have postponed execution through another avenue of federal litigation the Civil Rights Act of 1871 codified at 42 U S C 1983 allows complainants to bring lawsuits against state actors to protect their federal constitutional and statutory rights While direct appeals are normally limited to just one and automatically stay the execution of the death sentence Section 1983 lawsuits are unlimited but the petitioner will be granted a stay of execution only if the court believes he has a likelihood of success on the merits 154 Traditionally Section 1983 was of limited use for a state prisoner under sentence of death because the Supreme Court has held that habeas corpus not Section 1983 is the only vehicle by which a state prisoner can challenge his judgment of death 155 In the 2006 Hill v McDonough case however the United States Supreme Court approved the use of Section 1983 as a vehicle for challenging a state s method of execution as cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment The theory is that a prisoner bringing such a challenge is not attacking directly his judgment of death but rather the means by which that the judgment will be carried out Therefore the Supreme Court held in the Hill case that a prisoner can use Section 1983 rather than habeas corpus to bring the lawsuit Yet as Clarence Hill s own case shows lower federal courts have often refused to hear suits challenging methods of execution on the ground that the prisoner brought the claim too late and only for the purposes of delay Further the Court s decision in Baze v Rees upholding a lethal injection method used by many states has narrowed the opportunity for relief through Section 1983 Execution warrant Edit While the execution warrant is issued by the governor in several states in the vast majority it is a judicial order issued by a judge or by the state supreme court at the request of the prosecution The warrant usually sets an execution day Some states instead provide a longer period such as a week long or 10 day window to carry out the execution This is designated to avoid issuing a new warrant in case of a last minute stay of execution that would be vacated only few days or few hours later 156 Distribution of sentences Edit Total number of prisoners on death row in the United States from 1953 to 2008In recent years there has been an average of one death sentence for every 200 murder convictions in the United States Alabama has the highest per capita rate of death sentences This is because Alabama was one of the few states that allowed judges to override a jury recommendation in favor of life imprisonment a possibility it removed in March 2017 157 158 According to the Death Penalty Information Center the top three factors determining whether a convict gets a death sentence in a murder case are not aggravating factors but instead the location the crime occurred and thus whether it is in the jurisdiction of a prosecutor aggressively using the death penalty the quality of legal defense and the race of the victim murder of white victims being punished more harshly 159 Among states Edit The distribution of death sentences among states is loosely proportional to their populations and murder rates California which is the most populous state also has the largest death row with over 700 inmates Wyoming which is the least populous state has only one condemned man But executions are more frequent and happen more quickly after sentencing in conservative states Texas which is the second most populous state in the Union carried out over 500 executions during the post Furman era more than a third of the national total California has carried out only 13 executions during the same period and has carried out none since 2006 160 161 162 Among races Edit Main article Race and capital punishment in the United States Certain races within the United States are disproportionately incarcerated at higher rates than others African Americans who make up only 13 6 of the total population are disproportionately incarcerated in the prison system compared to white Americans 163 Statistics Edit Racial demographic of death row inmates in the U S 163 Racial demographic of District Attorneys in states that practice the death penalty in the U S 164 165 African Americans make up 41 of death row inmates 163 164 African Americans have made up 34 of those actually executed since 1976 163 166 Twenty one white offenders have been executed for the murder of a black person since 1976 compared to the 302 black offenders that have been executed for the murder of a white person during that same period 164 Most individuals involved in determining the verdict in death penalty cases are white As of 1998 Chief District Attorneys in counties using the death penalty are 98 white and only 1 are African American 165 A supporting fact discovered through examinations of racial disparities over the past twenty years concerning race and the death penalty found that in 96 of these reviews there was a pattern of either race of victim or race of defendant discrimination or both 165 80 of all capital cases involve white victims despite white people only making up approximately 50 of murder victims 167 With regard to innocent convicts 54 percent of people wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in the United States are black 64 percent are non white in general 168 63 8 of white death row inmates 72 8 of black death row inmates 65 4 of Latino death row inmates and 63 8 of Native American death row inmates or approximately 67 of death row inmates overall have a prior felony conviction 169 Approximately 13 5 of death row inmates are of Hispanic or Latino descent In 2019 individuals identified as Hispanic and Latino Americans accounted for 5 5 of homicides 170 The death penalty exhortation rate for Hispanic and Latino Americans is 8 6 168 Approximately 1 81 of death row inmates are of Asian descent 171 Organizations against the death penalty for racial equity Edit ACLU s Capital Punishment Project Edit The ACLU s Capital Punishment Project CPP is an anti death penalty project that works toward the repeal of the death penalty in the U S through advocacy and education 172 The project highlights the racial discriminatory aspects regarding capital punishment and promotes both abolition and systemic reform of the death penalty through direct representation strategic litigation and systemic reform 173 Equal Justice USA Edit Equal Justice USA is a national organization dedicated to healing racial equity and community safety in relation to criminal justice and violence 174 Their efforts spread wide and involve fundraising and hosting conventions to support communities of color The organization is aimed towards people of color who have been disproportionately impacted by the death penalty 175 Some of their efforts include advocacy to end the death penalty which they have helped to abolish in nine states 175 Black Americans and capital punishment Edit The geographic distribution of capital punishment in the United States has a strong correlation with the history of slavery and lynchings 3 States where slavery was legal before the Civil War also saw high numbers of lynchings after the civil war and into the 20th century These states include Alabama Arkansas Florida Georgia Kentucky Louisiana Mississippi North Carolina South Carolina and Tennessee 176 These states also introduced a criminal justice system with Black Codes that would designed to control Black people after slavery was abolished in 1865 following the Emancipation Proclamation and then officially with the ratification of the 13th Amendment 177 These states also have the highest rates of capital punishment sentences and executions today 3 Racial relationship between lynchings and capital punishment Edit Once slaveowners lost full ownership of formerly enslaved African Americans in 1865 lynchings were increasingly used both legally under the security of Black Codes and illegally to maintain white dominance and prevent African Americans from challenging their subordinate place in society 176 Because of Black Codes many African Americans were sent to jail to participate in slave like work in a system known as Convict leasing Others faced capital punishment for alleged crimes often in the form of lynching 177 Lynchings were able to be carried out because many positions within southern law enforcement including state officials and judges were held by former Confederate soldiers 178 Despite the passing of the Reconstruction Act of 1867 which weakened the strength of Black Codes and supported the 14th Amendment the rate of lynching of African Americans saw an increase 179 due the formation of the white supremacist terrorist group the Ku Klux Klan K K K in 1865 by former Confederates during Reconstruction They carried out many lynchings and terrorist attacks against Black people 178 After the end of the Reconstruction in 1877 when federal troops were removed from southern states in which they assisted in upholding the 14th Amendment s promises of equal protection Jim Crow laws began to gain traction which enforced segregation and the oppression of African Americans Segregation was legal under the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v Ferguson until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it unconstitutional 179 During and following the Civil Rights era laws were introduced to prevent illegal lynchings by the general public According to David Rigby and Charles Seguin the popularity of capital punishment increased as a way for White people to control Black people and instill fear 3 They argue that the disproportionate number of Black Americans sentenced to death during the 20th century often wrongfully convicted shows that capital punishment was used as a way for White people to control Black people in a similar manner to lynching In 1972 the Supreme Court ruled in Furman v Georgia that capital punishment was unconstitutional Rigby and Seguin argue that this led to an increase in the illegal lynchings of African Americans 3 In 1976 the Supreme Court decision in Gregg v Georgia 180 upheld the death penalty and overturned Furman v Georgia Rigby and Seguin argue that this decision was based on a fear that lynchings by the general public would increase if the death penalty did not remain in place 3 Although more than 6 500 lynchings occurred between 1865 and 1950 according to the Equal Justice Initiative lynching did not become a federal crime until 2022 under the Emmett Till Antilynching Act which was signed into law by President Joe Biden over a hundred years after Antilynching legislation was first proposed 181 21st century legal scholars Civil Rights lawyers and advocates like Michelle Alexander often refer to both past and modern police officers and officials of the United States criminal justice system s as legalized modern lynch mobs because they have the ability to sentence one to life in prison or with the death penalty under the law but with the jurisdiction of potentially incorporating their personal racial biases 182 The ability for a Black person to be convicted to death with the potential that racial bias was used in their sentencing was upheld during the McCleskey v Kemp court case in Georgia 183 182 Groups like the NAACP s Legal Defense Fund LDF have continuously worked and continue to work on abolishing capital punishment based on its historically racist associations with enslavement and lynching and also its disproportionate impact on racial minority communities 184 Racial breakdown of sentences by state Edit Capital punishment is still active in 27 states which including the following Alabama Arizona Arkansas California Florida Georgia Idaho Indiana Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada North Carolina Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Wyoming 185 Of these Oklahoma Texas Delaware Missouri and Alabama make up the top five states with the highest rate of executions per capita 186 However Texas Oklahoma Virginia Florida and Missouri are the top five states with the highest number of executions Texas alone has imposed 570 executions since 1976 186 The racial makeup of the people sentenced to death reveals a disproportionate representation of Black people Consider the following states with the highest execution rates per capita defined as executions per 100 000 residents Top five states with the highest rates of execution per capita Edit State Rate of execution per capita per 100 000 residents 186 Number of executions 186 Total population 187 of state population that is Black 187 of those currently on death row who are Black 163 Oklahoma 2 83 112 3 986 639 7 8 40 5Texas 1 97 570 29 527 941 13 2 45 2Delaware 1 64 16 1 003 384 23 6 Missouri 1 47 90 6 168 187 11 8 30Alabama 1 37 67 5 039 877 26 8 48 2 since 1976 Death penalty is now abolished 186 Not applicable since the death penalty was abolished Texas Edit Capital punishment in Texas Texas is the state with the highest number of cumulative executions since 1976 Black people make up about 45 of the current death row population in Texas 188 though only make up about 13 of the state s general population 189 Oklahoma Edit Capital punishment in Oklahoma Oklahoma is the state with the second highest number of cumulative executions since 1976 Black people make up 46 of death sentences in Oklahoma County though only make up 16 of the county s total population 190 It is also the only state that has four methods of execution while most others only have one or two methods These methods of execution include lethal injection nitrogen hypoxia electrocution and firing squad Alabama Edit Capital punishment in Alabama Alabama s death penalty sentences persist as it declines among many other states in the U S The state continues to have one of the nation s highest rates of death sentences per capita 191 As of April 1 2022 there are currently 80 Black people and 84 white people on death row 163 Though the Black and white populations are both about half of the total death row population in Alabama Black people are represented at a disproportionately high number considering they make up only 27 of Alabama s general population 192 Virginia Edit Capital punishment in Virginia The death penalty in Virginia came to an end on March 24 2021 when the state became the first Southern state to abolish the death penalty Prior to abolition Virginia had some of the most executions out of any state since 1976 as well as the most executions overall in the pre Furman v Georgia era 193 Exonerations Edit Exonerations in relation to the death penalty are defined as the absolving of someone from their previous verdict of guilty and sentencing of death Since January 1 1973 103 out of the 190 total exonerations in the U S have been African Americans 168 African Americans account for about 54 of all exonerations This article is about the death penalty within the United States For the relationship between race and crime see Race and crime in the United States During the middle of the 20th century a period of mass incarceration occurred in the United States 194 The United States became the country with the highest incarceration rate which caused the prison population to become heavily Black by the 1990s whereas it was mainly only white in previous years 194 White people accounted for 51 of the prison population while Black people accounted for 47 of the entire prison population during the 1990s 195 Even though Black people made up of around half the jail inhabitants they only were 12 1 of the United States population and white citizens made up 80 3 of the total population during that time 196 The prison population had increased from 196 441 people in 1970 to 1 6 million by 2008 194 This discrepancy of races in the prison population related to the overall demographics of the United States has to do with the inconsistency of police arrests on citizens Moving into 2015 Black people still made up only 12 1 of the total population but made up 18 of people who were stopped by police on the road 197 This led to the increase of disproportionate demographics in local jails and prison systems By 2018 592 Black people were in local jails per every 100 000 people and 2 271 Black men were incarcerated in federal prisons per 100 000 people 197 On the other hand white people were incarcerated at a rate of 187 per 100 000 people in local jails and white men at the federal level were incarcerated at a rate of 392 per 100 000 people 197 This dramatic increase in Black arrests caused America s prison population to boom which was all due to this long lasting period of mass incarceration Mass incarceration had been increasing and there are many factors sustaining its rise From over policing to disproportionately long prison sentences Black people have been targeted in mass incarceration and as a result more susceptible to capital punishment 198 Cases Edit With the United States operation based on the U S Constitution federalism allows the state government to share powers with the federal government 199 Under the various capacities different court cases are heard in the national and state court systems A defendant can be inflicted with the death penalty if they are found condemned of capital offenses 200 like first degree murder murder with special circumstances treason or genocide 200 201 Because capital offenses are criminal cases the state court systems are responsible to hear the majority of them The Supreme Court and state courts discretion in keeping the death penalty option are separate for the most part if not appealed to the Supreme Court According to the Legal Information Institute it is not necessary that the actual punishment imposed was the death penalty but rather a capital office is classified as such if the permissible punishment prescribed by the legislature for the offense is the death penalty 201 After Roper v Simmons in 2005 the federal court deemed if the defendant was under 18 years old at the time of the crime they can not be sentenced to death because it violates the 8th Amendment 202 George Stinney Jr Edit In 1944 14 year old African American George Stinney Jr was convicted of murdering two white girls He was the youngest person in the United States to be sentenced to death 203 Stinney was executed by electrocution within 80 days of the murders In 2014 Stinney s convictions were vacated and he was exonerated on the grounds that his 6th amendment rights had been violated It was found Stinney s interrogation had included coercion and an absence of counsel and of parental guidance 203 Police said that Stinney had confessed but no signed confession was ever produced 204 The Judge who overturned the conviction wrote that Stinney s appointed counsel made no independent investigation did not request a change of venue or additional time to prepare the case he asked little or no questions on cross examination of the State s witnesses and presented few or no witnesses on behalf of his client based on the length of trial He failed to file an appeal or a stay of execution Stinney s sister said in a 2009 affidavit that she was with Stinney on the day of the murders but she was never called to testify during thr trial 204 Exonerated Five Edit The systemic issue of biased investigation conduct is also seen in the Exonerated Five case The Exonerated Five are made up of four black youths Kevin Richardson Antron McCray Yusef Salaam and Korey Wise 205 They are formerly known as the Central Park Five and the Jogger Case The boys received mixed convictions for assault robbery riot rape sexual abuse and attempted murder of a white woman in 1990 205 The boys faced intense un recorded interrogations for at least seven hours in the absence of legal counsel with video confessions following beside Salaam 205 Wise additionally had no parent present during questioning and confessing 205 The five youths later pleaded not guilty and recanted their statements because they were produced under intimidation 205 Despite no DNA evidence linking any of the boys to the crime scene they were sentenced to 5 to 15 years 205 After 12 years the sole perpetrator Matias Reyes confessed to the crime while providing a DNA match to the only DNA selection found at the scene 206 Their false confessions were recognized for inconsistencies and their convictions were vacated in December 2002 207 They later sued the state and the city for reparations and received approximately 44 million in a settlement 208 The full page advertisement was taken out by Trump in the May 1 1989 issue of the Daily News 209 Donald Trump spent 85 000 in submitting the ad across four New York City newspapers 209 During the 1990 trial former president Donald Trump a real estate character at the time bought full page ads voicing his reaction to the Central Park case 205 In the ad Donald Trump says the following I want to hate these muggers and murderers They should be forced to suffer and when they kill they should be executed for their crimes They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence 210 209 The youths ranged from the ages of 14 16 years when the ad was released In an archival interview with Larry King Trump feels his belief is a common feeling because he received 15 000 letters of praise following the ad 211 In retrospect Salaam reflects in an 2021 interview with PBS MetroFocus saying I look at what Donald Trump as being the nails that sealed us in the coffin And then what happened after that they published our names our addresses and phone numbers in the New York City newspapers When you think about Donald Trump s ad it was a whisper into society to have someone come to our homes to drag us from our beds and to do to us what they had done to Emmett Till 212 Because the youths were minors their identities were supposed to remain confidential Salaam shares that his family received an insurgence of death threats following Trump s advertisement culminating in a climate of aggressive hate A Central Park Five representative comments that Trump s ad influenced public opinion possibly further tainting the impartiality of potential jurors who already had a natural affinity for the victim 209 As of 2019 Donald Trump has refused to apologize and retract his statements despite the exoneration of the men 213 Lena Baker Edit Lena Baker was a Black woman who was wrongfully convicted of the murder of her abuser in 1945 214 In Georgia Baker served as a maid for a handicapped white man she faced regular sexual and physical abuse from him 214 Despite the town terrorizing Baker to leave the relationship her abuser would equally threaten her with violence if she ever left 214 215 Weeks before his death he started holding Baker prisoner in his gristmill for numerous days 214 Baker was able to escape the mill but when she came back her abuser threatened her with an iron bar 214 After a struggle Baker took ahold of his pistol and shot the man in self defense 215 The all white all male jury did not empathize with Baker s case of self defense as a survivor of his slave like conditions including sexual and physical abuse 216 In less than a day the jury found Baker guilty of capital murder which happened to result in a mandatory death sentence in Georgia at the time 216 After failed appeals reviews and the abandonment of her legal representation Lena Baker was executed by electrocution in 1945 216 About 60 years following Baker s death her family with the help of the Prison and Jail Project requested a posthumous pardon 217 Their efforts succeeded in 2005 when Baker was granted a full and unconditional pardon from the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles because there was a lack of evidence to demonstrate Baker s intent to kill 217 If the justice system had been careful with the evidence they would have noted Baker s conviction did not qualify as capital murder and should have resulted in a sentence other than the death penalty Between sexes Edit As of May 20 2021 the Death Penalty Information Center reports that there are 51 women on death row 17 women have been executed since 1976 218 compared to 1 516 men during the same time period 219 Since 1608 15 391 lawful executions are confirmed to have been carried out in jurisdictions of or now of the United States of these 575 or 3 6 were women Women account for 1 50 death sentences 1 67 people on death row and 1 100 people whose executions are actually carried out While always comparatively rare women are significantly less likely to be executed in the modern era than in the past Of the 16 women executed on the state level most took place in either Texas 6 Oklahoma 3 or Florida 2 and were demographically 25 4 African American with the rest 12 being white of any ethnicity Historically the states that have executed the most women are California Texas and Florida though unlike Texas and Florida California has not executed a woman in the post Furman era The racial breakdown of women sentenced to death is 61 white 21 black 13 Latina 3 Asian and 2 American Indian 218 Methods Edit Usage of lethal injection in the US State uses only this method State uses this method primarily but also has other methods State once used this method but does not now State once adopted this method but dropped before its use State has never adopted this method Firing squad usage in the United States State uses this as a secondary method State once used this method but no longer does State has never used this method State has considered using a firing squad Number of executions each year by the method used in the United States and the earlier colonies from 1608 to 2004 The adoption of electrocution caused a marked drop off in the number of hangings which was used even less with the use of gas inhalation After Gregg v Georgia most states changed to lethal injection leading to its rise All 27 states with the death penalty for murder provide lethal injection as the primary method of execution Vermont s remaining death penalty statute for treason provides electrocution as the method of execution 78 failed verification Some states allow other methods than lethal injection but only as secondary methods to be used merely at the request of the prisoner or if lethal injection is unavailable due to an inability to procure the necessary drugs or due to court challenges to lethal injection s constitutionality 220 221 Several states continue to use the historical three drug protocol firstly an anesthetic secondly pancuronium bromide a paralytic and finally potassium chloride to stop the heart 222 Eight states have used a single drug protocol inflicting only an overdose of a single anesthetic to the prisoner 222 While some state statutes specify the drugs required a majority do not giving more flexibility to prison officers 222 Pressures from anti death penalty activists and shareholders have made it difficult for correctional services to get the chemicals Hospira the only U S manufacturer of sodium thiopental stopped making the drug in 2011 223 In 2016 it was reported that more than 20 U S and European drug manufacturers including Pfizer the owner of Hospira had taken steps to prevent their drugs from being used for lethal injections 223 224 225 Since then some states have used other anesthetics such as pentobarbital etomidate 226 or fast acting benzodiazepines or sedatives like midazolam 227 Many states have since bought lethal injection drugs from foreign furnishers and most states have made it a criminal offense to reveal the identities of furnishers or execution team members 223 228 In November 2015 California adopted regulations allowing the state to use its own public compounding pharmacies to make the chemicals 229 In 2009 Ohio approved the use of an intramuscular injection of 500 mg of hydromorphone a 333 fold lethal overdose for an opioid naive person 230 and a supratherapeutic dose of midazolam as a backup means of carrying out executions when a suitable vein cannot be found for intravenous injection 231 232 Lethal injection was held to be a constitutional method of execution by the U S Supreme Court in three cases Baze v Rees 2008 Glossip v Gross 2015 and Bucklew v Precythe 2019 233 234 Offender selected methods Edit In the following states death row inmates with an execution warrant may always choose to be executed by 221 Lethal injection in all states as primary method in South Carolina as secondary method or unless the drugs to use it are unavailable Electrocution in Alabama Florida and South Carolina primary method Gas chamber in California and Missouri Nitrogen hypoxia in AlabamaIn four states an alternate method firing squad in Utah lethal gas in Arizona and electrocution in Arkansas Kentucky and Tennessee is offered only to inmates sentenced to death for crimes committed prior to a specified date usually when the state switched from the earlier method to lethal injection The alternate method will be used for all inmates if lethal injection would be declared unconstitutional In five states an alternate method is used only if lethal injection would be declared unconstitutional electrocution in Arkansas nitrogen hypoxia electrocution or firing squad in Mississippi and Oklahoma firing squad in Utah lethal gas in Wyoming In Alabama Oklahoma and Tennessee any constitutional method is possible if all the other methods are declared unconstitutional In the state that abolished death penalty or where its statute was declared unconstitutional people sentenced to death for a crime before the date of the abolition may retroactively be subjected to death penalty Those states methods are lethal injection in Colorado lethal injection in Delaware unless the offense was committed before 1986 in which case the inmate could choose between lethal injection and hanging lethal injection in New Hampshire unless this method is impratical in which case hanging would be the method lethal injection or electrocution in Virginia lethal injection or hanging in WashingtonWhen an offender chooses to be executed by a means different from the state s default method which is always lethal injection he she loses the right to challenge its constitutionality in court See Stewart v LaGrand 526 U S 115 1999 The most recent executions by methods other than injection are as follows all chosen by the inmate Method Date State InmateElectrocution 20 February 2020 Tennessee Nicholas Todd SuttonFiring squad 18 June 2010 Utah Ronnie Lee GardnerGas chamber 3 March 1999 Arizona Walter Bernhard LaGrandHanging 25 January 1996 Delaware Billy BaileyBackup methods Edit Depending on the state the following alternative methods are statutorily provided in case lethal injection is either found unconstitutional by a court or unavailable for practical reasons 220 221 235 Electrocution in Arkansas Florida Kentucky 236 Mississippi Oklahoma South Carolina and Tennessee Lethal gas in Alabama California Mississippi Missouri Oklahoma and Wyoming Firing squad in Mississippi Oklahoma South Carolina and Utah Hanging in New Hampshire where repeal of the death penalty in 2019 is not retroactive Several states including Oklahoma Tennessee and Utah have added back up methods recently or have expanded their application fields in reaction to the shortage of lethal injection drugs 221 237 Oklahoma and Mississippi are the only states allowing more than two methods of execution in their statutes providing lethal injection nitrogen hypoxia electrocution and firing squad to be used in that order if all earlier methods are unavailable The nitrogen option was added by the Oklahoma Legislature in 2015 and has never been used in a judicial execution 238 After struggling for years to design a nitrogen execution protocol and to obtain a proper device for it Oklahoma announced in February 2020 it abandoned the project after finding a new reliable source of lethal injection drugs 239 Some states such as Florida have a larger provision dealing with execution methods unavailability requiring their state departments of corrections to use any constitutional method if both lethal injection and electrocution are found unconstitutional This was designed to make unnecessary any further legislative intervention in that event but the provision applies only to legal not practical infeasibility 240 241 In March 2018 Alabama became the third state after Oklahoma and Mississippi to authorize the use of nitrogen asphyxiation as a method of execution 242 Federal executions Edit The method of execution of federal prisoners for offenses under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 is that of the state in which the conviction took place If the state has no death penalty the judge must choose a state with the death penalty for carrying out the execution The federal government has a facility at U S Penitentiary Terre Haute and regulations only for executions by lethal injection but the United States Code allows U S Marshals to use state facilities and employees for federal executions 243 244 Execution attendance Edit The over 200 witnesses to the execution of Timothy McVeigh were mostly survivors and victims relatives of the Oklahoma City bombing The last public execution in the U S was that of Rainey Bethea in Owensboro Kentucky on August 14 1936 It was the last execution in the nation at which the general public was permitted to attend without any legally imposed restrictions Public execution is a legal phrase defined by the laws of various states and carried out pursuant to a court order Similar to public record or public meeting it means that anyone who wants to attend the execution may do so Around 1890 a political movement developed in the United States to mandate private executions Several states enacted laws which required executions to be conducted within a wall or enclosure or to exclude public view Most state laws currently use such explicit wording to prohibit public executions while others do so only implicitly by enumerating the only authorized witnesses 245 All states allow news reporters to be execution witnesses for information of the general public except Wyoming which allows only witnesses authorized by the condemned 246 247 248 Several states also allow victims families and relatives selected by the prisoner to watch executions An hour or two before the execution the condemned is offered religious services and to choose their last meal except in Texas which abolished it in 2011 The execution of Timothy McVeigh on June 11 2001 was witnessed by over 200 people most by closed circuit television Most were survivors or relatives of victims of the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing for which McVeigh had been sentenced to death Public opinion EditThis section is written like a personal reflection personal essay or argumentative essay that states a Wikipedia editor s personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style July 2019 Learn how and when to remove this template message Gallup Inc has monitored support for the death penalty in the United States since 1937 by asking Are you in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder Gallup surveys documented a sharp increase in support for capital punishment between 1966 and 1994 249 However perhaps as the result of DNA exonerations of death row inmates reported in the national media in the late 1990s 250 support began to wane falling from 80 in 1994 to 56 in 2019 Moreover approval varies substantially depending on the characteristics of the target and the alternatives posed with much lower support for putting juveniles and the mentally ill to death 26 and 19 respectively in 2002 249 Given the fact that attitudes toward capital punishment are often responsive to events to characteristics of the target and to alternatives many believe that the conventional wisdom that death penalty attitudes are impervious to change is flawed Accordingly any analysis of death penalty attitudes must account for the responsiveness of such attitudes as well as their reputed resistance to change 251 Pew Research polls have demonstrated declining American support for the death penalty 80 in 1974 78 in 1996 55 in 2014 and 49 in 2016 252 253 The 2014 poll showed significant differences by race 63 of whites 40 of Hispanics and 36 of blacks respectively supported the death penalty in that year However in 2018 Pew s polls showed public support for the death penalty had increased to 54 from 49 Since 2016 opinions among Republicans and Democrats have changed little but the share of independents favoring the death penalty has increased by eight percentage points from 44 to 52 254 A 2010 poll by Lake Research Partners found that 61 of voters would choose a penalty other than the death sentence for murder 255 When persons surveyed are given a choice between the death penalty and life without parole for persons convicted of capital crimes support for execution has traditionally been significantly lower than in polling that asks only if a person does or does not support the death penalty In Gallup s 2019 survey support for the sentence of life without parole surpassed that for the death penalty by a margin of 60 to 36 249 A 2014 study found that the belief that the death penalty helps victims families to heal may be wrong more often than finding closure victims families felt anger and wanted revenge with potential side effects of depression PTSD and a decreased satisfaction with life Furthermore the researchers found that a sense of compassion or remorse expressed from the perpetrator to the victim s family had a statistically significant positive effect on the family s ability to find closure 256 In November 2009 another Gallup poll found that 77 of Americans believed that the mastermind of the September 11 attacks Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should receive the death penalty if convicted 12 points higher than the rate of general support for the death penalty upon Gallup s most recent poll at the time 257 A similar result was found in 2001 when respondents were polled about the execution of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people 258 Debate EditCapital punishment is a controversial issue with many prominent organizations and individuals participating in the debate Amnesty International and other groups oppose capital punishment on moral grounds Some law enforcement organizations and some victims rights groups support capital punishment The United States is one of the four developed countries that still practice capital punishment along with Japan Singapore and Taiwan Religious groups are widely split on the issue of capital punishment 259 The Fiqh Council of North America a group of highly influential Muslim scholars in the United States has issued a fatwa calling for a moratorium on capital punishment in the United States until various preconditions in the legal system are met 260 Reform Judaism has formally opposed the death penalty since 1959 when the Union of American Hebrew Congregations now the Union for Reform Judaism resolved that in the light of modern scientific knowledge and concepts of humanity the resort to or continuation of capital punishment either by a state or by the national government is no longer morally justifiable The resolution goes on to say that the death penalty lies as a stain upon civilization and our religious conscience In 1979 the Central Conference of American Rabbis the professional arm of the Reform rabbinate resolved that both in concept and in practice Jewish tradition found capital punishment repugnant and there is no persuasive evidence that capital punishment serves as a deterrent to crime 261 In October 2009 the American Law Institute voted to disavow the framework for capital punishment that it had created in 1962 as part of the Model Penal Code in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment A study commissioned by the institute had said that experience had proved that the goal of individualized decisions about who should be executed and the goal of systemic fairness for minorities and others could not be reconciled 262 As of 2017 update 159 prisoners have been exonerated due to evidence of their innocence 18 255 263 Advocates of the death penalty say that it deters crime is a good tool for prosecutors in plea bargaining 264 improves the community by eliminating recidivism by executed criminals provides closure to surviving victims or loved ones and is a just penalty Some advocates who against the death penalty argue that most of the rest of the world gave up on human sacrifice a long time ago 265 The murder rate is highest in the South 6 5 per 100 000 in 2016 where 80 of executions are carried out and lowest in the Northeast 3 5 per 100 000 with less than 1 of executions A report by the US National Research Council in 2012 stated that studies claiming a deterrent effect are fundamentally flawed and should not be used for policy decisions 255 According to a survey of the former and present presidents of the country s top academic criminological societies 88 of these experts rejected the notion that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder 255 Data shows that the application of the death penalty is strongly influenced by racial bias 255 Furthermore some opponents argue that it is applied in an arbitrary manner by a criminal justice system that has been shown to be biased through the systemic influence of socio economic geographic and gender factors 266 Another argument in the capital punishment debate is the cost 255 267 Opponents to the death penalty note that the lethal injection the most common method of carrying out the death penalty can oftentimes cause executed individuals to remain conscious for several minutes after administering the injection causing them to feel severe pain in their veins 268 The three drug cocktail consists of midazolam a sedative vecuronium bromide a paralytic and potassium chloride which stops the heart 269 Opponents note that the midazolam in particular may mask the executed individual s pain and suffering 270 Opponents argue that this causes unnecessary pain and suffering on the executed individual and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution 270 Additionally in 2021 22 states such as South Carolina have experienced a shortage of the drugs used to make the lethal cocktail and some inmates have had to choose between death by electric chair or death by firing squad aiming for the heart 271 Critics note that these other methods are more likely to induce pain in the inmate during execution 272 and that these methods of execution have a high risk of being botched 273 Botched executions Edit Further information Capital punishment Non painful execution One of the main arguments against the use of capital punishment in the United States is that there has been a long history of botched executions University of Colorado Boulder Professor Michael L Radelet described a botched execution as an execution that causes the prisoner to suffer for a long period of time before they die 274 This has led to the argument that capital punishment is per se cruel and unusual punishment The following is a short list of examples of botched executions that have occurred in the United States William Kemmler was the first person executed in the electric chair in 1890 After being pronounced dead after 17 seconds he was found to be still alive The current was applied a second time for two minutes to complete the death 275 In Arizona it took Joseph Wood two hours to die after being injected 276 In Alabama the execution of Doyle Hamm was called off after prison medical staff spent nearly three hours attempting to insert an IV that could be used to administer the lethal injection drugs In the process the execution team punctured Hamm s bladder and femoral artery causing significant bleeding 277 278 In Florida Jesse Joseph Tafero had flames burst from his hair during an electrocution 279 Wallace Wilkerson died after 27 minutes in pain after the firing squad failed to shoot him in the heart 280 Because of this the constitutionality of the use of the firing squad was questioned The Supreme Court of the United States affirmed that the firing squad did not violate the Eighth Amendment in the case Wilkerson v Utah 1879 281 In New Mexico Thomas Ketchum was decapitated when his body fell through the trap door during his hanging 282 In Mississippi Jimmy Lee Gray died after being in the gas chamber for nine minutes During the procedure Gray thrashed and banged his head against the metal pole behind his head while struggling to breathe 283 Austin Sarat a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College in his book Gruesome Spectacles Botched Executions and America s Death Penalty found that from 1890 to 2010 276 executions were botched out of a total of 8 776 or 3 15 with lethal injections having the highest rate Sarat writes that between 1980 and 2010 the rate of botched executions was higher than ever 8 53 percent 279 Death penalty experts found that 36 8 of all executions attempted or completed in 2022 all lethal injections were botched 284 Clemency and commutations EditIn states with the death penalty the governor usually has the discretionary power to commute a death sentence or to stay its execution In some states the governor is required to receive an advisory or binding recommendation from a separate board In a few states like Georgia the board decides alone on clemency At the federal level the power of clemency belongs to the President of the United States 285 The largest number of clemencies was granted in January 2003 in Illinois when outgoing Governor George Ryan who had already imposed a moratorium on executions pardoned four death row inmates and commuted the sentences of the remaining 167 to life in prison without the possibility of parole 286 When Governor Pat Quinn signed legislation abolishing the death penalty in Illinois in March 2011 he commuted the sentences of the fifteen inmates on death row to life imprisonment 55 Previous post Furman mass clemencies took place in 1986 in New Mexico when Governor Toney Anaya commuted all death sentences because of his personal opposition to the death penalty In 1991 outgoing Ohio Governor Dick Celeste commuted the sentences of eight prisoners among them all four women on the state s death row And during his two terms 1979 1987 as Florida s governor Bob Graham although a strong death penalty supporter who had overseen the first post Furman involuntary execution as well as 15 others agreed to commute the sentences of six people on the grounds of doubts about guilt or disproportionality On December 14 2022 outgoing Oregon governor Kate Brown commuted the death sentences of all 17 inmates on Oregon s death row to life imprisonment without parole citing the death penalty s status as an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction and never has been administered fairly and equitably and calling it wasteful of taxpayer dollars while questioning its ability to function as a deterrence to crime 287 Governor Brown also ordered the dismantling of Oregon s lethal injection chamber and death row Prior Oregon had an ongoing official moratorium set by prior governor John Kitzhaber in 2011 and had not carried out any executions since that of Douglas Franklin Wright in 1997 furthermore in 2019 the Oregon State Senate amended the state s death penalty statutes to significantly reduce the number of crimes that warranted the death penalty thereby invalidating many of the state s active death sentences In 2021 David Ray Bartol s death sentence was overturned on the grounds of it being a disproportionate punishment in violation of Oregon s state constitution which death penalty experts and abolitionist advocates said would provide the rationale for the eventual overturning of every other death sentence in Oregon Brown is the third Oregon governor to commute every standing death sentence in the state after Governor Robert D Holmes who commuted every death sentence passed during his tenure from 1957 to 1959 and Governor Mark Hatfield who commuted every death sentence in the state after Oregon temporarily abolished the death penalty in accordance with a statewide vote in 1964 288 287 Moratoria and reviews on executions EditAll executions were suspended through the country between September 2007 and April 2008 At that time the United States Supreme Court was examining the constitutionality of lethal injection in Baze v Rees This was the longest period with no executions in the United States since 1982 The Supreme Court ultimately upheld this method in a 7 2 ruling In addition to the states that have no valid death penalty statute the following 17 states and 3 jurisdictions either have an official moratorium on executions or have had no executions for more than ten years as of 2023 State jurisdiction Status Moratorium and or review status 289 Federal Government by Attorney General In 2021 Attorney General Merrick Garland set a moratorium pending review 290 Military de facto No executions since 1961 American Samoa de facto No method of execution defined by law No executions since gaining self governance in 1949 There are currently no prisoners under a sentence of death in the territory Arizona by Governor and Attorney General In January 2023 Governor Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Kris Mayes halted executions for a review of state s executions process after three botched executions in 2022 291 California by Governor and court order On March 13 2019 Governor Gavin Newsom set a moratorium There has also been a court ordered moratorium on executions in effect since December 15 2006 292 293 Idaho de facto No executions since 2012 Indiana de facto No executions since 2009 excluding federal executions at USP Terre Haute Kansas de facto Kansas has had no executions since 1965 Kansas restored the death penalty in 1994 but no current death row inmates have exhausted their appeals Kentucky by court order In 2009 a state judge suspended executions pending a new protocol 294 295 Louisiana de facto No executions since 2010 no involuntary executions since 2002 Montana by court order In 2015 a state judge ruled the state s lethal injection protocol is unlawful stopping executions 296 Nevada de facto No executions since 2006 North Carolina by implementers Executions are suspended following a decision by the state s medical board that physicians cannot participate in executions which is a requirement under state law Ohio de facto In 2020 Governor Mike DeWine set an informal moratorium The state will no longer use lethal injection but state law does not currently specify any other method of execution Oregon by Governor In 2011 Governor John Kitzhaber set a moratorium and a review 297 Pennsylvania by Governor In 2015 Governor Tom Wolf set a moratorium pending review 298 South Carolina de facto No executions since 2011 Tennessee by Governor On May 2 2022 Governor Bill Lee set a moratorium on all executions in Tennessee that were scheduled to be executed in 2022 299 Utah de facto No executions since 2010 Wyoming de facto Wyoming has had no executions since 1992 There are currently no prisoners under a sentence of death in the state Since 1976 four states have only executed condemned prisoners who voluntarily waived any further appeals Pennsylvania has executed three inmates Oregon two Connecticut one and New Mexico one In the last state Governor Toney Anaya commuted the sentences of all five condemned prisoners on death row in late 1986 300 In California United States District Judge Jeremy Fogel suspended all executions in the state on December 15 2006 ruling that the implementation used in California was unconstitutional but that it could be fixed 301 California Governor Gavin Newsom declared an indefinite moratorium on March 13 2019 he also ordered the closure and dismantling of the death chamber In 2023 Governor Newsom ordered the relocation of death row inmates out of death row and to different prisons across the country to phase out the practice of segregating people on death row based solely on their sentence although no inmates were offered commutations or re sentencing hearings related to these developments Relocated death row inmates who obtained jobs in prison would have 70 percent of their earnings sent to their victims families 302 303 The CDCR says the move allows the state to phase out the practice of segregating people on death row based solely on their sentence No inmates will be re sentenced and no death row commutations offered officials say On November 25 2009 the Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed a decision by the Franklin County Circuit Court suspending executions until the state adopts regulations for carrying out the penalty by lethal injection 295 In November 2011 Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber announced a moratorium on executions in Oregon canceling a planned execution and ordering a review of the death penalty system in the state 297 On February 13 2015 Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf announced a moratorium on the death penalty Wolf will issue a reprieve for every execution until a commission on capital punishment which was established in 2011 by the Pennsylvania State Senate produces a recommendation 298 The state had not executed anyone since Gary M Heidnik in 1999 On July 25 2019 U S Attorney General William Barr announced that the federal government would resume executions using pentobarbital rather than the three drug cocktail previously used Five convicted death row inmates were scheduled to be executed in December 2019 and January 2020 304 On November 20 2019 U S District Judge Tanya S Chutkan issued a preliminary injunction preventing the resumption of federal executions Plaintiffs in the case argued that the use of pentobarbital may violate the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 305 The stay was lifted in June 2020 and four executions were rescheduled for July and August 2020 96 On July 14 2020 Daniel Lewis Lee was executed He became the first convict executed by the federal government since 2003 20 Overall thirteen federal prisoners were executed during the presidency of Donald Trump between July 2020 and January 2021 The last convict executed was Dustin Higgs on January 16 2021 On July 1 2021 U S Attorney General Merrick Garland halted all federal executions pending review of the changes made under the Trump administration 290 See also EditCapital punishment in Japan Capital punishment by the United States federal government Capital punishment debate in the United States Felony murder and the death penalty in the United States List of death row inmates in the United States List of last executions in the United States by crime List of people executed in the United States in 2023 List of people scheduled to be executed in the United States List of United States Supreme Court decisions on capital punishment Lists of people executed in the United StatesExplanatory notes Edit Map only displays the status of the death penalty for crimes committed in the present and future Some abolitionist states may still allow one to be sentenced to death for crimes committed before the abolition of the capital punishment in that state and may still have inmates on death row who at the time of abolition did not have their sentences commuted Although capital punishment is in theory a legal punishment there are currently no statutes that govern the execution of a sentence of death resulting in a situation where life imprisonment is the de facto highest punishment in American Samoa References EditCitations Edit Death Penalty States 2022 Death Penalty Info Retrieved September 8 2022 States and capital punishment National Conference of State Legislatures Retrieved June 23 2017 a b c d e f Rigby David Seguin Charles March 2021 Capital Punishment and the Legacies of Slavery and Lynching in the United States The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 694 1 205 219 doi 10 1177 00027162211016277 ISSN 0002 7162 S2CID 235760878 Bienen Leigh B 2010 Murder and Its Consequences Essays on Capital Punishment in America 2nd ed Northwestern University Press p 143 ISBN 978 0 8101 2697 8 Reichert Elisabeth 2011 Social Work and Human Rights A Foundation for Policy and Practice Columbia University Press p 89 ISBN 978 0 231 52070 6 Durrant Russil 2013 An Introduction to Criminal Psychology Routledge p 268 ISBN 978 1 136 23434 7 Bryant Clifton D Peck Dennis L 2009 Encyclopedia of Death amp Human Experience Sage Publications p 144 ISBN 978 1 4129 5178 4 Roberson Cliff 2015 Constitutional Law and Criminal Justice Second Edition CRC Press p 188 ISBN 978 1 4987 2120 2 Lethal injection capitalpunishmentuk org Retrieved March 16 2016 China Guatemala Philippines Thailand Vietnam The brutal way Saudi Arabia treats the people it is going to execute The Independent October 13 2015 The confronting truth behind executions NewsComAu February 17 2015 Welsh Huggins Andrew November 5 2006 States give sedatives to inmates before execution Helena Independent Record Associated Press a b Latzer Barry October 27 2010 Death Penalty Cases Leading U S Supreme Court Cases on Capital Punishment Elsevier p 37 ISBN 978 0 12 382025 9 Death Sentences in the United States From 1977 By State and By Year Death Penalty Information Center Retrieved April 24 2017 a b Execution Statistics Summary State and Year people smu edu rhalperi Retrieved January 26 2017 Georgia inmate is the 1 500th person executed in the US since the death penalty was reinstated CNN June 21 2019 Retrieved June 21 2019 Innocence List of Those Freed From Death Row Death Penalty Information Center Archived from the original on May 13 2019 Retrieved May 13 2019 a b Dwyer Moss Jessica 2013 Flawed Forensics and the Death Penalty Junk Science and Potentially Wrongful Executions Seattle Journal for Social Justice Vol 11 Iss 2 Article 10 p 760 Fins Deborah DEATH ROW U S A Spring 2022 A quarterly report by Legal Defense Fund PDF NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Retrieved January 2 2023 a b c US Executes First Federal Prisoner Convicted Of Murder In 17 Years www ndtv com Retrieved July 14 2020 List of Federal Death Row Prisoners deathpenaltyinfo org Death Penalty Information Center Retrieved May 11 2021 Allen Jonathan Acharya Bhargav January 16 2021 U S carries out 13th and final execution under Trump administration Reuters Retrieved January 16 2021 Attorney General Merrick B Garland Imposes a Moratorium on Federal Executions Orders Review of Policies and Procedures OPA Department of Justice Justice gov July 1 2021 Retrieved June 29 2022 Human Rights 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extraordinary bit of drama not least because a top Democrat who once strongly supported capital punishment led the fight to end it Top court Delaware s death penalty law unconstitutional August 2 2016 Archived from the original on July 1 2017 Retrieved May 14 2019 Richburg Keith B December 14 2007 N J Approves Abolition of Death Penalty Corzine to Sign The Washington Post Archived from the original on May 14 2019 Retrieved May 14 2019 in English Maria Medina Governor OK with Astorga capital case Archived August 26 2009 at the Wayback Machine New Mexico governor bans death penalty Agence France Presse March 18 2009 Archived from the original on April 18 2010 Retrieved December 23 2009 New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson made his state the 15th in the nation to outlaw capital punishment when he signed a law abolishing the death penalty his office said a b Quinn signs death penalty ban commutes 15 death row sentences to life Chicago Tribune March 9 2011 Retrieved March 9 2011 RECENT LEGISLATION Death Penalty Repeal Passes Second Connecticut House Awaits Governor s Signature Death Penalty Information Center Deathpenaltyinfo org April 12 2012 Archived from the original on May 14 2019 Retrieved May 14 2019 Connecticut governor signs bill to repeal death penalty FOX News Network LLC April 25 2012 Archived from the original on May 14 2019 Retrieved May 14 2019 Wagner John March 16 2013 Md General Assembly repeals death penalty The Washington Post Retrieved May 14 2019 Clemency deathpenaltyinfo org Retrieved April 6 2016 2016 New Mexico Statutes Chapter 20 Military Affairs Article 12 Code of Military Justice Justia Law Retrieved May 13 2023 Connecticut s highest court overturns its death penalty CNN August 13 2015 Retrieved April 6 2016 Voters in California Oklahoma and Nebraska chose to preserve and strengthen the death penalty news vice com Retrieved November 9 2016 State Of Washington respondent v Allen Eugene Gregory PDF Washington Supreme Court October 11 2018 No 88086 7 Baumann Lisa April 20 2023 Washington state officially abolishes death penalty The Seattle Times Associated Press Retrieved April 20 2023 Senate overrides Sununu ending death penalty in New Hampshire Concord Monitor May 30 2019 Retrieved May 30 2019 Governor signs bill abolishing Colorado s death penalty commutes sentences of state s 3 death row inmates The Colorado Sun March 23 2020 Schneider Gregory S March 24 2021 Virginia abolishes the death penalty becoming the first Southern state to ban its use The Washington Post Archived from the original on March 24 2021 Retrieved March 24 2021 Kelley Alexandra March 24 2021 Virginia officially first Southern state to abolish the death penalty The Hill Retrieved March 24 2021 Arango Tim March 13 2019 California Death Penalty Suspended 737 Inmates Get Stay of Execution Published 2019 The New York Times 31 States with the Death Penalty and 21 States with Death Penalty Bans Death Penalty ProCon org deathpenalty procon org Retrieved May 2 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concerning sentence if capital sentencing jury cannot agree PDF A Parrent Conn Public Def Retrieved March 15 2016 SB 280 Sentencing for Capital Felonies flsenate gov Retrieved March 15 2017 See United States v Perez 1824 Scheidegger Kent S February 4 2016 Hurst v Florida Remedial Legislation and SBP 7068 PDF crimeandconsequences com a b See e g 18 U S C 3595 In a case in which a sentence of death is imposed the sentence shall be subject to review by the court of appeals upon appeal by the defendant See generally Appeal a b Poland v Arizona 476 U S 147 1986 Justia Law Retrieved May 14 2023 Freedman Eric M January 6 2006 Giarratano is a Scarecrow The Right to Counsel in State Capital Post Conviction Proceedings Rochester NY SSRN 874046 a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a Cite journal requires journal help Teague v Lane 489 U S 288 1989 Justia Law Retrieved May 13 2023 LaFave Israel amp King 6 Crim Proc 28 11 b 2d ed 2007 LaFave Israel amp King 6 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Words Capital Punishment Criminal Brief Facts about the Death Penalty PDF Death Penalty Information Center p 3 Retrieved April 21 2017 a b c d e f Racial Demographics Death Penalty Information Center Retrieved December 8 2022 a b c Death Penalty Information Center Facts about the Death Penalty PDF deathpenaltyinfo org December 15 2022 Retrieved October 25 2022 a b c The Death Penalty in Black and White Who Lives Who Dies Who Decides Death Penalty Information Center Retrieved December 8 2022 U S Census Bureau QuickFacts United States www census gov Retrieved December 16 2022 Race and the Death Penalty American Civil Liberties Union Retrieved December 16 2022 a b c Exonerations by Race Death Penalty Information Center Death Row Inmates Death Penalty ProCon org Death Penalty Retrieved December 16 2022 Hispanics and the Death Penalty Death Penalty Information Center Retrieved February 22 2016 Fins Deborah Death Row U S A Spring 2020 PDF naacp org NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund Inc 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Proposed President Biden Signs Historic Law Making Lynching a Federal Crime Death Penalty Information Center Retrieved December 15 2022 a b Alexander Michelle 2010 The New Jim Crow New York New York The New Press pp 108 159 ISBN 9781595588197 McCleskey v Kemp Oyez Retrieved December 16 2022 Steiker Carol S Steiker Jordan M January 13 2020 The Rise Fall and Afterlife of the Death Penalty in the United States Annual Review of Criminology 3 1 299 315 doi 10 1146 annurev criminol 011518 024721 ISSN 2572 4568 S2CID 214110074 State by State Death Penalty Information Center Retrieved December 16 2022 a b c d e State Execution Rates through 2020 Death Penalty Information Center Retrieved December 8 2022 a b U S Census Bureau QuickFacts United States www census gov Retrieved December 16 2022 Texas Death Penalty Facts TCADP tcadp org Retrieved December 8 2022 U S Census Bureau QuickFacts Texas www census gov Retrieved December 8 2022 Deeply Rooted How Racial History Informs Oklahoma s Death Penalty Death Penalty Information Center Retrieved December 8 2022 Alabama s Death Penalty Equal Justice Initiative Retrieved December 8 2022 U S Census Bureau QuickFacts Alabama www census gov Retrieved December 8 2022 Why It s So Significant Virginia Just Abolished the Death Penalty Time Retrieved December 8 2022 a b c American History Race and Prison Vera Institute of Justice Retrieved November 8 2022 Stephan James 1991 Jail Inmates 1990 PDF Race and Hispanic Origin in the U S and all States 1990 PDF a b c Visualizing the racial disparities in mass incarceration Retrieved December 8 2022 Mass Incarceration The Cause and Effect on Hunger moveforhunger org Retrieved December 16 2022 Comparing Federal amp State Courts United States Courts Retrieved December 16 2022 a b capital offense LII Legal Information Institute Retrieved December 16 2022 a b Sentencing www justice gov November 7 2014 Retrieved December 7 2022 Roper v Simmons 543 U S 551 2005 Justia Law Retrieved December 16 2022 a b It took 10 minutes to convict 14 year old George Stinney Jr It took 70 years after his execution to exonerate him Washington Post ISSN 0190 8286 Retrieved December 13 2022 a b South Carolina Vacates the Conviction of 14 Year Old Executed in 1944 Death Penalty Information Center Retrieved December 13 2022 a b c d e f g The Central Park Five HISTORY Retrieved December 13 2022 Margaritoff Marco April 13 2021 This Serial Rapist Brutalized The Central Park Jogger But Five Black Teens Were Blamed All That s Interesting Retrieved December 15 2022 Saulny Susan December 20 2002 Convictions and Charges Voided In 89 Central Park Jogger Attack The New York Times ISSN 0362 4331 Retrieved December 13 2022 Harris Aisha May 30 2019 The Central Park Five We Were Just Baby Boys The New York Times ISSN 0362 4331 Retrieved December 13 2022 a b c d Donald Trump and the Central Park Five the racially charged rise of a demagogue the Guardian February 17 2016 Retrieved December 7 2022 Q22686 Viaf 49272447 Isni 0000 0001 0898 6765 Ulan 500082105 n85387872 LCCN Nla 35123886 WorldCat May 1989 File Trump Bring Back Death Penalty ad 1989 jpg Wikipedia commons wikimedia org Retrieved December 7 2022 Sarlin Andrew Kaczynski Jon October 7 2016 Trump in 1989 Central Park Five interview Maybe hate is what we need CNN Politics CNN Retrieved December 7 2022 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint multiple names authors list link Franklin Jane May 26 2021 Yusef Salaam on exoneration prison reform amp racial justice Chasing the Dream Retrieved December 7 2022 Trump digs in on Central Park 5 They admitted their guilt NBC News Retrieved December 7 2022 a b c d e Lena Baker Case New Georgia Encyclopedia Retrieved December 13 2022 a b Lena Baker is Executed African American Registry Retrieved December 13 2022 a b c The Black Commentator The Lena Baker Story Execution in a small town Issue 40 blackcommentator com Retrieved December 13 2022 a b In Honor of Lena Baker Posthumously Congressman Sanford Bishop January 3 2011 Archived from the original on August 31 2019 Retrieved December 13 2022 a b Women and the Death Penalty Death Penalty Information Center deathpenaltyinfo org Retrieved November 8 2017 Facts About the Death Penalty PDF a b Methods of Execution clarkprosecutor org Retrieved March 28 2016 a b c d Methods of Execution deathpenaltyinfo org Retrieved June 14 2020 a b c State by State Lethal Injection Death Penalty Information Center Retrieved May 14 2016 a b c Eckholm Erik May 13 2016 Pfizer Blocks the Use of Its Drugs in Executions The New York Times ISSN 0362 4331 Retrieved May 14 2016 Richmond Ben October 28 2013 Will the EU kill America s Death Penalty Motherboard Vice Media Inc Archived from the original on November 2 2013 Retrieved November 5 2013 Algar Clare October 22 2013 Big Pharma May Help End The Death Penalty The New Republic Retrieved November 5 2013 The Washington Post A death penalty landmark for Florida Executing a white man for killing a black man Liptak Adam June 29 2015 Supreme Court Allows Use of Execution Drug The New York Times ISSN 0362 4331 Retrieved October 5 2016 Secret Execution Team Firing Squads Restricted Media Included in House Bill jacksonfreepress com Retrieved April 6 2016 Notice of change to regulations PDF cdcr ca gov Archived from the original PDF on January 15 2016 Retrieved May 22 2016 Mosby s 2004 Hydromorphone Ohio Prisons Director Announces Changes to Ohio s Execution Process Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction November 13 2009 Archived from the original on January 15 2013 Retrieved January 17 2014 Arizona execution takes two hours BBC News July 24 2014 Retrieved July 24 2014 High court upholds lethal injection method Cable News Network CNN April 16 2008 Retrieved June 30 2017 Supreme Court backs use of lethal injection drug Cable News Network CNN June 29 2015 Retrieved June 30 2017 South Carolina Code of Laws Section 24 3 530 Death by electrocution or lethal injection law justia com Retrieved June 4 2016 Method of execution in event of unconstitutionality of KRS 431 220 codes findlaw com Retrieved March 22 2020 How to kill America s death penalty dilemma cnn com March 24 2016 Retrieved March 28 2016 The Dawn of a New Form of Capital Punishment Time April 17 2015 Oklahoma Attorney general says state will resume executions nypost com February 13 2020 Retrieved March 22 2020 922 105 Execution of death sentence leg state fl us Retrieved March 28 2016 40 23 114 Death by lethal injection Election of electrocution law justia com Retrieved March 30 2016 Alabama 3rd state to allow execution by nitrogen gas Associated Press March 22 2018 26 3 Date time place and method of execution law cornell edu Retrieved March 15 2017 18 U S Code 3597 Use of State facilities law cornell edu Retrieved March 15 2017 Federal regulations 28 CFR 26 4 Archived from the original on January 18 2014 Texas Execution Information Texas Execution Primer www txexecutions org Retrieved August 5 2015 States go hunting for execution witnesses jacksonsun com Retrieved July 15 2017 permanent dead link Wyoming Code 7 13 908 law justia com Retrieved July 15 2017 a b c Death Penalty Gallup October 24 2006 Retrieved July 24 2019 Baumgartner De Boef Boydstun Frank Suzanna Amber 2011 The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0521715249 a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a CS1 maint multiple names authors list link Peffley Mark Hurwitz Jon October 1 2007 Persuasion and Resistance Race and the Death Penalty in America American Journal of Political Science 51 4 996 1012 doi 10 1111 j 1540 5907 2007 00293 x Oliphant Baxter September 29 2016 Support for death penalty lowest in more than four decades Dactank News in Numbers Pew Research Centre Retrieved October 5 2016 Shrinking Majority of Americans Support Death Penalty Pew Research Center March 28 2014 Retrieved January 31 2018 Oliphant J Baxter Public support for the death penalty ticks up Pew Research Center Retrieved May 13 2023 a b c d e f Facts about the Death Penalty PDF Death Penalty Information Center December 9 2015 Retrieved December 23 2015 Eaton Judy Christensen Tony June 23 2014 Closure and its myths International Review of Victimology 20 3 327 343 doi 10 1177 0269758014537148 ISSN 0269 7580 S2CID 143577831 Americans at Odds With Recent Terror Trial Decisions gallup com November 27 2009 Retrieved April 10 2016 Foes of death penalty say McVeigh is an exception usatoday com Retrieved April 10 2016 ReligiousTolerance ReligiousTolerance Retrieved December 1 2011 Archived copy Archived from the original on August 15 2021 Retrieved March 3 2010 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint archived copy as title link Why Reform Judaism Opposes the Death Penalty ReformJudaism org Retrieved March 3 2019 Lipak Adam January 4 2010 Group Gives Up Death Penalty Work The New York Times Innocence List of Those Freed From Death Row Death Penalty Information Center October 28 2010 Retrieved March 11 2011 Pitkin James January 23 2008 Killing Time Dead Men Waiting on Oregon s Death Row Willamette Week Archived from the original on January 24 2008 Retrieved March 11 2011 Peacock John Jeffrey Wood Metafilter Retrieved June 3 2020 Londono O March 5 2013 A Retributive Critique of Racial Bias and Arbitrariness in Capital Punishment Journal of Social Philosophy 44 1 95 105 doi 10 1111 josp 12013 Letter Cost of the Death Penalty The New York Times California February 28 2009 Retrieved December 1 2011 Shackford Scott April 22 2022 Possible Problems With Lethal Injection Drugs Stop Tennessee Execution Reason com Retrieved May 14 2023 3 drug cocktail focal point of controversy in Oklahoma s execution of death row inmates KFOR com Oklahoma City October 28 2021 Retrieved May 14 2023 a b The Case Against the Death Penalty American Civil Liberties Union Retrieved May 14 2023 Death by Firing Squad Returns to South Carolina April 18 2022 The shocking truth about the electric chair Washington Examiner March 29 2016 Retrieved May 14 2023 Botched Executions Death Penalty Information Center Retrieved June 2 2022 So Long as They Die Lethal Injections in the United States VI Botched Executions www hrw org Retrieved April 26 2018 Botched Executions in American History Death Penalty Information Center Retrieved May 4 2018 Hannon Elliot July 23 2014 Arizona Man Gasps and Snorts During Lethal Injection Execution That Took Nearly Two Hours Slate Retrieved July 24 2014 Gory botched Alabama s aborted execution of inmate was bloody says lawyer The Guardian Reuters February 26 2018 Retrieved May 4 2018 Segura Liliana March 3 2018 Another Failed Execution the Torture of Doyle Lee Hamm The Intercept Retrieved August 9 2019 a b Botched Executions deathpenaltyinfo org Death Penalty Information Center Retrieved May 4 2018 Acker James A Champagne Ryan May 2 2018 The Execution of Wallace Wilkerson Precedent and Portent Criminal Justice Review 42 349 367 doi 10 1177 0734016817702193 S2CID 148715242 WILKERSON v UTAH LII Legal Information Institute Retrieved May 4 2018 yongli September 21 2016 Thomas E Ketchum coloradoencyclopedia org Retrieved May 4 2018 Capital punishment UK PDF www capitalpunishmentuk org As Lethal Injection Turns Forty States Botch a Record Number of Executions Death Penalty Information Center December 7 2022 Archived from the original on December 16 2022 Retrieved December 18 2022 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a archive date archive url timestamp mismatch help Clemency deathpenaltyinfo org Retrieved January 14 2021 Illinois Death Row Inmates Granted Commutation by Governor George Ryan on January 12 2003 Deathpenaltyinfo org Retrieved December 1 2011 a b Gov Kate Brown Commutes the Sentences of Oregon s 17 Death Row Prisoners Death Penalty Information Center December 14 2022 Archived from the original on December 16 2022 Retrieved December 18 2022 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a archive date archive url timestamp mismatch help Borrud Hillary December 13 2022 Gov Kate Brown commutes sentences of all 17 people on Oregon s death row The Oregonian OregonLive Archived from the original on December 14 2022 Retrieved December 14 2022 California moves slowly toward resuming executions seattletimes com April 23 2017 Retrieved May 25 2017 California has long been what one expert calls a symbolic death penalty state one of 12 that has capital punishment on the books but has not executed anyone in more than a decade a b Attorney General Merrick B Garland Imposes a Moratorium on Federal Executions Orders Review of Policies and Procedures The United States Department of Justice July 1 2021 Retrieved July 2 2021 Botched Executions Prompt New Arizona Governor and Attorney General to Halt Executions Pending Independent Review of State s Execution Process Death Penalty Information Center January 23 2023 Retrieved January 24 2023 Gov Gavin Newsom to block California death row executions close San Quentin execution chamber Los Angeles Times March 13 2019 Civil Rights Groups Accuse California District Attorneys of Unlawfully Interfering in Death Penalty Lawsuit Death Penalty Information Center March 11 2021 Retrieved March 13 2021 Kentucky Judge Rules Against Lethal Injection Protocol and Halts Execution Death Penalty Information Center Retrieved July 11 2016 a b Musgrave Beth November 26 2009 Decision halts lethal injections Latest Local State News Kentucky com Retrieved December 1 2011 span, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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