Earlier this month, the Legal Defense Fund released its Winter 2024 issue of Death Row USA (DRUSA), updating the status of the thirty death rows in the U.S. as of January 1, 2024.1 The LDF quarterly census documents a nearly 17% decline in the country’s death-row population in the past five years, including a 3.9% decline in the last year alone. All the more remarkable, the decline occurred during a five-year period with the fewest executions in more than three decades.
According to the Winter 2024 DRUSA, 2,241 men and women were on death rows across the United States or faced jeopardy of a death sentence being reimposed in a new trial or capital sentencing proceeding on January 1, 2024.2 That was 449 fewer than the 2,690 death-sentenced individuals on January 1, 2019 and ninety fewer than the 2,331 people on U.S. death rows at the start of 2023. The last time fewer men and women were on death row in the U.S. or faced the possibility of capital resentencing was in July 1989, when DRUSA reported death row at 2,210 people.
The Geography of the U.S. Death Penalty Decline
2023 marks the 23rd consecutive year in which more people have been removed from death rows in the U.S. than have been added to them. Five death rows have been emptied in the past five years,326 others have declined in size, and two have been stable. No U.S. death row has grown during this period. (See Table 1, below.)
The decline has been most pronounced in the three states that have imposed formal moratoria on executions, California, Pennsylvania, and Oregon, which collectively accounted for 37.7% of the net reduction in the death-row population nationwide. Death row was down by 95 people in California (12.9% of the state’s Winter 2019 death-row population), by 43 in Pennsylvania (a 27.6% decline), and by 32 in Oregon, where 15 former death-row prisoners were non-capitally resentenced, exonerated, or died and Governor Kate Brown issued a blanket commutation to the remaining 17 who still faced active death sentences.
It may seem incongruous to say this during a week in which two executions have taken place, but with the exception of the 13-person execution spree in 2020 and 2021 at the end of the Trump presidency, executions have contributed relatively little to the decline. The 92 executions between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2023 were the fewest in any five-year period in the United States since 1987-1991, when fifteen states carried out 89 executions. And the 79 executions by 10 states in 2019-2023 — 82.3% of which were carried out by just five states: Texas (28), Oklahoma (11), Alabama (9), Missouri (9), and Florida (8) — were the fewest state executions since 1982-1986, when 11 states executed 64 prisoners. Halfway through 2024, there have been just nine executions, a pace that would make 2024 the tenth consecutive year with fewer than 30 executions.
In the past five years, only the federal government, Oklahoma, and Missouri executed more people than came off their death rows as a result of non-capital resentencings, exonerations, or death by other causes. (Table 2.) Even Texas had more people removed from death row (33) for reasons other than execution, although its combination of 28 executions and 14 new death sentences still exceeded the number of non-capital removals from death row. And there was only one other state — Alabama — in which the combination of executions (9) and new death sentence (15) exceeded non-capital removals from death row (21).
On the other hand, the historically low numbers of new death sentences over the past five years contributed significantly to the erosion of death rows across the county. (Table 3.) Sixteen states and the federal government imposed new death sentences between January 1, 2019 and January 1, 2024. But the 112 new death sentences they imposed were the fewest in any five-year period since the U.S. Supreme Court declared existing death penalty statutes unconstitutional in 1972. In fact, more death sentences were imposed across the U.S. in every year from 1974 through 2008 than in the five years from 2019 through 2023, and new death sentences topped 300 in five of those years and topped 250 in fourteen others.
Two outlier states that permit permit non-unanimous death sentences — Alabama (15) and Florida (26) — accounted for more than 1/3 of the new death sentences imposed nationwide (36.6%) in the last five years. Two other states — California (17) and Texas (14) — accounted for more than another quarter (27.7%). Only Florida, California, and Texas imposed at least one new death sentence each year from 2019 to 2023.
The rest of the country combined accounted for barely one-third of the nation’s death sentences (40 of 112, 35.7%). And no state added more people to its death row than permanently came off of death row as a result of court decisions, commutations, exonerations, or deaths other than by execution.
In total, more than 1 in 5 individuals in the U.S. who had been on death row or facing potential capital resentencings on January 1, 2019 permanently came off of death row by January 1, 2024. And nearly 4 in 5 of those (359 of 451, 79.6%) were removed from death row by means other than execution.
What the Executions Tell Us
The execution data from the last five years confirm two key observations about the U.S. death penalty. First, most states aren’t executing anyone. Second, the cases in which the death penalty is being carried out continue to exhibit the race-of-victim and race-of-defendant bias that embodies capital punishment’s discriminatory history.
As I will discuss in more detail in a forthcoming post, six habitual executioners — Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, Missouri, Georgia, and Alabama — account for more than two-thirds of all executions in the United States in the past fifty years (1,066 of 1,589, 67.1%). They are responsible for 87.3% of the executions carried out by states in the decade from 2014 through 2023 (183 of 210), 88.6% of the state executions since the January 1, 2019 DRUSA (78 of 88), and every execution in the U.S. in 2023 and so far in 2024.
Phrased differently, the other 44 states have collectively accounted for roughly one in eight U.S. executions since 2014 and for none since 2022, this during a time in which 26 states permitted capital punishment for at least part of the decade. And while a few of those states had short execution sprees during that time, none has engaged in the pattern of sustained killings exhibited by the habitual executioners.
Looking at the victims in the recent execution cases also tells us a lot about whose lives the death penalty values most and whose lives it devalues. While about half of the victims of murder in the U.S. are White, 75.8% of all the executions in the U.S. from the first modern-era execution in 1977 through January 1, 2024 involved only White victims. As far as the death penalty is concerned, White-victim’s lives matter more. White defendants are executed almost exclusively for killing White victims. Although the vast majority of murders by individuals of any race are committed against people of the same race, every other racial and ethnic group is disproportionately executed for murders in which White victims are killed. Historically, nearly 2/3 of the African Americans executed in the past half-century had been sentenced to death in White-victim cases. (Table 4.)
The White-victim bias continued in the period from January 1, 2019 through January 1, 2024. During that time, 69 of the 92 execution cases (exactly 75%) involved only White victims and 70 cases (76.1%) involved at least one White victim. (Table 5.) African Americans were put to death in 13 cases with White victims (18.6%) and other defendants of color were executed in an additional five White-victim cases (7.1%). By contrast, African Americans were the victims in 17 cases (18.5% of all executions), including one case that also had two white victims.
Consistent with past history, the majority of the prisoners put to death from 2019 to 2023 (54 of 92, 58.7%) were White. Also consistent with history, White prisoners were almost exclusively executed for killing White victims (52 of 54, 96.3%). Prisoners of color, on the other hand, were again disproportionately executed in cases of interracial murder, almost always with White victims.
More than half of the prisoners of color executed from 2019 through 2023 (20 of 38, 52.6%) had been convicted of interracial murders. 44.8% of the Black prisoners and 55.6% of Latino, Asian, or Native American prisoners executed in the past five years were put to death on charges of killing at least one White victim. By contrast, interracial murders comprised just 3.7% of the cases in which White defendants were executed.
Individuals of color who were executed in 2019 through 2023 were 14.2 times more likely to have been condemned for an interracial killing than were the White prisoners who were executed (52.6%/3.7%), and the odds that an execution involved an interracial killing were 24.3 times greater for a Black death-row prisoner (14:15/2:52) and 28.9 times greater for all individuals of color (20:18/2:52) than for White prisoners.
The State of the States as of January 1, 2024
The largest death rows in the United States have also experienced the greatest declines. At the start of 2024, California’s death-row population — the nation’s largest — had fallen to 641. Twenty-eight people came off its death row in 2023, partially offset by four new death sentences. The net decline of 24 people was the most of any jurisdiction in the country last year. Florida’s death row — still the country’s second largest — fell from 313 on January 1, 2023 to 294 at the start of 2024. It was the first time Florida opened a year with fewer than 300 death sentenced prisoners since 1990. Texas’s death row was down by eleven people to 181.
The other states with 100 or more individuals on death row or facing possible capital resentencing were Alabama (166), North Carolina (140), Ohio (119), Arizona (115), and Pennsylvania (113). Arizona and Pennsylvania switched positions as the 7th and 8th largest state death rows, as Arizona added one person to its death row (the only state to do so) and Pennsylvania’s death row declined by ten people.
Among states with at least ten people on death row or facing capital resentencing, Texas’s death row, at 75.1%, had the highest percentage of individuals of color. Nebraska, with six Latino prisoners and one Black prisoner on its 11-person death row, was next at 72.7%. The other states with minority death-row populations at or above sixty percent were: Louisiana, 69.8%; California, 67.4%; Mississippi, 66.7%; North Carolina, 61.4%; and Georgia, 60.0%.
- The 30 death rows include the 27 U.S. states that have the death penalty, federal civilian death row, U.S. military death row, and New Hampshire, which still has one person on death row following the state’s prospective abolition of capital punishment in 2019. ↩︎
- The cumulative death-row totals in the table on the 1-Year and 5-Year Decline in U.S. Death Row Population are slightly higher because they include several prisoners who had been sentenced to death for different crimes committed in different states in the totals for both states in which they were technically on death row. ↩︎
- The New Mexico Supreme Court cleared its state’s death row on June 28, 2019, vacating the death sentences of the two prisoners who had been left behind by the state legislature’s prospective repeal of the death penalty ten years earlier. The court ruled that applying the death penalty to the two men violated the proportionality requirements of the statute under which they had been sentenced to death.
Colorado prospectively repealed its death penalty statute on March 23, 2020. That same day, Gov. Jared Polis cleared the state’s death row, commuting the death sentences of the three remaining death-sentenced prisoners to life without possibility of parole.
Virginia abolished its death penalty on March 24, 2021. The repeal bill, signed into by Gov. Ralph Northam, applied retroactively to the three prisoners then on the state’s death row.
On March 25, 2022, Wyoming prosecutors formally ended their efforts to resentence Mark Wayne Eaton to death. Eaton’s death sentence had been overturned in 2014 and the appeals of his conviction had concluded in 2019. At that time, he had been the only person on Wyoming’s death row and his was the only active death penalty case in the state.
In Oregon, Gov. Kate Brown granted clemency to all 17 of the state’s death-row prisoners, commuting their death sentences to life without parole, effective December 14, 2022. ↩︎