The United States death-row population shrank more than at any other time in more than two decades in 2024 and U.S. death row experienced its largest one-year percentage decline in nearly a half-century, a Death Penalty Policy Project review of fifty years of death-row data has found.
According to the Winter 2025 edition of Death Row USA,1 the quarterly census of death row by the Legal Defense Fund, 2,092 men and women were imprisoned on death row or facing capital sentencing retrials in the U.S. at the start of 2025. That number was down 149 from the 2,241 who were on death row or facing potential reimposition of the death penalty at the start of 2024,2 marking the first time in more than 36 years that the U.S. death-row population had fallen below 2,100.
U.S. death row has declined in size every year since 2001, a sustained 24-year erosion that has seen the number of people facing execution or possible capital resentencing plunge 43.9% from its peak of 3,726 at the close of 2000.3 The 6.6% one-year decline was the most in 48 years, dating back to the United States Supreme Court decisions in 1976 that struck down statutes that had permitted mandatory death sentences.4 The last time DRUSA reported fewer than 2,100 people in the United States in jeopardy of execution was in the May 1988 death row census, when the organization, then known as the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., identified 2,048 on death row or facing possible capital resentencing.5
The death-row population decline occurred even as the United States experienced its ninth straight year of 25 or fewer executions6 and was spurred by landmark grants of clemency at the state and federal levels. On December 23, President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners on federal death row,7 the largest commutation of federal civilian death sentences in U.S. history. Then, on his final day in office on December 31, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper issued 15 death-row commutations,8 more commutations in a single day than any southern state had granted in the entire preceding fifty years.9 The 52 commutations were double the number of new death sentences imposed in 2024.
The Winter 2025 Death Row USA also found that the convictions or death sentences of at least 137 individuals who are still listed in its census as being on death row had been overturned. These men and women no longer had active death sentences but faced continuing jeopardy of death either in pending capital retrials or resentencing proceedings or if prosecution appeals succeeded in reinstating the death penalty. The 1,955 people with active death sentences marked the first time since LDF’s August 1988 death row census that there were fewer than 2,000 active death sentences in the United States.10
In 1972, in Furman v. Georgia,11 the United States Supreme Court struck down all existing U.S. death penalty statutes, removing 640 people from death rows across the country and launching the modern era of the U.S. death penalty. The 149-person net reduction in the U.S. death-row population in 2024 was the second largest decline since then, surpassed only by the 189-person drop in 200312 when Gov. George Ryan cleared Illinois’ death row by granting clemency to 171 condemned prisoners, pardoning four and commuting the sentences of 167 others. The only other one-year triple-digit decline in the number of people on death row or facing possible capital resentencing trials occurred in 2022,13 when Gov. Kate Brown commuted the death sentences of all 17 prisoners on Oregon ‘s death row.14
Although commutations have played a major role in the historic one-year declines in the U.S. death row population this century, the main drivers of the long-term erosion of capital punishment across the country have been the non-capital disposition of death sentences overturned in the courts and the dramatic drop in the number of new death sentences imposed by juries. DRUSA reported 72 cases from ten states in 2024 in which individuals previously sentenced to death were resentenced to life or less or exonerated. It also identified 24 death-sentenced prisoners in six states who died in custody in 2024.15 States executed 25 prisoners in 2024 and sentenced 26 capital defendants to death.
The Moratorium Effect
As in other recent years, the vast majority of the death row population decline in 2024 came in jurisdictions in which the executive branch had imposed formal moratoria on executions. California, the federal government, and Pennsylvania accounted for 72.5% of the reduction in the nation’s death-row population, with 108 removals from death row and only three new death sentences.
California experienced the largest death-row population decline of any U.S. death penalty jurisdiction. Sixty-six people came off of the state’s death row, one by exoneration, 52 by non-capital resentencings, and 13 by deaths in custody. The death-row removals were twenty times larger than the three new death sentences imposed in the state. With a net death-row population reduction of 63, California had 591 men and women sentenced to death or facing potential capital resentencing trials at the close of 2024. It was the first time the state’s death row had been below 600 since the summer of 2001.16
California imposed 223 new death sentences between 1995 through 2000 (an average of 37.2 per year)17 as its death-row population soared toward the 600 mark. It has imposed 20 new death sentences over the past six years (an average of 3.3), a sustained 91.0% decline.
Federal death row declined by 39 people, with two non-capital resentencings preceding President Biden’s 37 commutations. Pennsylvania’s death-row population decreased by six as a result of one exoneration, three non-capital resentencings, and two deaths in custody. No new death sentences were imposed in Pennsylvania or in the federal courts in 2024.
The Long-Term Systemic Decline and Unsustainability of the U.S. Death Penalty
2024 provided mounting evidence of the unsustainability of the death penalty in the United States. The year was the ninth in a row with fewer than 30 executions and fewer than 45 new death sentences. And perhaps more significantly for the long-term prospects of capital punishment, the rate of decline in jury-imposed death sentences is outpacing the decline in executions. That means that, even with near generationally low numbers of executions, death row is shrinking because juries are rejecting the death penalty.
The Death Penalty Policy Project has analyzed the 53 years of sentencing and execution data in the modern history of the U.S. death penalty and calculated the ratio of new death sentences to executions for each year. (See Table 1, below.)18 The pattern of decline is unmistakable. From 1981 through 1996, courts in the U.S. imposed 4,535 death sentences and carried out 355 executions, a ratio of 12.8 new death sentences for every execution. Even at the height of executions in the United States from 1997 to 2003, a seven-year period in which states averaged more than 75 executions per year, the 1,535 new death sentences imposed during that period still nearly tripled (2.9:1) the number of prisoners put to death.
But the expansion of U.S. capital punishment has long since halted. New death sentences are no longer replenishing the death-row population. In the past five years, the ratio of new death sentences to executions has shrunk even further, to 1.1 sentences per execution. These five years include the four lowest death-sentence to execution ratios in modern history (2023, 2024, 2020, and 2022) and the only year in that history in which there were fewer new death sentences than executions (2023).
The U.S. death penalty has become unsustainable. And that is now the case even before we consider the single most likely outcome of a U.S. death penalty case — people who are released from death row because courts have overturned their unconstitutional convictions or death sentences and they have been resentenced to life or less.
Outlier States and Aberrant Practices Continue to Drive the U.S. Death Penalty
The reality of the U.S. death penalty is that it is driven by the aberrant practices of a few outlier states. States have carried out 1,591 executions since they resumed putting prisoners to death in 1977. But the vast majority of those executions have occurred in a very small number of states. Just seven — Texas (591), Oklahoma (126), Virginia (113), Florida (106), Missouri (101), Alabama (78), and Georgia (77) — account for 3/4ths (74.9%) of all state executions in the past fifty years (the federal government has conducted 16).
Virginia no longer has the death penalty, but the other six habitual executioners, each of whom carried out at least one execution in 2024, are responsible for 1,079 executions: more than two-thirds (67.6%) of all executions by U.S. states. In 2024, those six states conducted 80.0% of all executions, providing additional evidence that the U.S. death penalty has become increasingly concentrated in these high execution outlier states. And even there, recent events reflect a death penalty in decline: Missouri has imposed only one new death sentences in the past six years; Georgia has imposed only two in the past decade.
As the death penalty continues to erode nationally, the states seeking to revive it have increasingly engaged in aberrant and legally questionable practices. At the sentencing stage, this has been epitomized by the aberrant practice in Alabama and Florida of permitting death sentences based upon non-unanimous jury sentencing votes.
2024 had the second lowest ratio of new death sentences to executions (1.04:1) in the modern history of U.S. capital punishment. However, if Florida not adopted the nation’s most permissive standard for court-imposed death sentencing, allowing judges to disregard the life votes of as many as a third of the jury, the year would have been the second in history in which executions outnumbered new death sentences.19
Overall, non-unanimous death sentences — three in Alabama20 and six in Florida21 — accounted for more than one third of the 26 death sentences imposed nationwide in 2024 (34.6%). Non-unanimity also significantly undermined the integrity of executions carried out in the U.S. last year. Sixteen percent of the year’s executions involved cases in which one or more jurors had voted for life (4 of 25), including one case in which an Alabama judge condemned Kenneth Smith to die despite an 11 to 1 jury vote for life.
At the start of 2025, one out of every seven people on death row or facing possible capital resentencing in the United States — 14.2% of the nation’s death-row population — had been sentenced to death in proceedings in which jurors either did not agree that the defendant should be sentenced to death or had affirmatively recommended a life sentence. That included nearly sixty percent of Florida’s death row (169 of 283 people, 59.7%) and more than three-quarters of those on death row in Alabama (126 of 163, 77.3%).
In addition, the modern death penalty continues to be disproportionally driven by unreliable proceedings in which critical evidence was never properly considered because defendants were held to have waived their trial rights or the conviction and death sentence was never subjected to meaningful appellate review because death-row prisoners were deemed to have waived their appeals. Four of the new death sentences imposed in 2024 (15.4%) involved cases in which defendants waived their rights to have a jury determine their sentence,22 refused to present any mitigating evidence to spare their lives,23 or pleaded guilty and told the jury to they deserved to be sentenced to death.24 Similarly, three of the executions in 2024 (12.0%) involved “volunteers” who were executed without appellate review of their cases.25
Historically, volunteers have constituted at least 10% of U.S. executions over the past fifty years.26 They were the first in the modern era to be executed in fifteen states and the first executed by the federal government.27 On seven different occasions, volunteers also have jumpstarted the resumption of executions in a state after hiatuses of five or more years, including the execution of Joseph Corcoran by Indiana on December 18, 2024.28
Further, drug manufacturers and reputable compounding pharmacies now decline to participate in executions and those pharmacies that can be persuaded to compound chemicals for use in executions refuse to be publicly associated with the practice. In response, jurisdictions that want to carry out executions have increasingly retreated into secrecy to hide the questionable and sometimes illegal conduct they have engaged in to obtain execution drugs. This lack of transparency and accountability has in turn fed the growing public perception that our governments — state and federal — cannot be trusted to fairly and competently administer the death penalty, further undermining its legitimacy.
Public support for capital punishment is at a 50-year low.29 Distrust in the practice is at a record high.30 Opposition to the death penalty is even higher among younger Americans.31 Juries across the United States are less and less willing to impose new death sentences. Death row is shrinking further and further every year.
2024 may not have yet dealt capital punishment a fatal blow, but the year provided some of the strongest evidence to date that the U.S. death penalty is unsustainable.
FOOTNOTES
- Legal Defense Fund, Death Row USA, Winter 2025, released January 16, 2025 (Winter 2025 DRUSA).
↩︎ - Compare Winter 2025 DRUSA with Legal Defense Fund, Death Row USA, Winter 2024 (as of January 1, 2024).
↩︎ - Compare Winter 2025 DRUSA with NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., Death Row USA, Winter 2001 (as of January 1, 2001).
↩︎ - The same day that the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976), it struck down mandatory death sentencing statutes in Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280 (1976) and Roberts v. Louisiana, 428 U.S. 325 (1976). LDF was aware of 411 people on death rows in 30 states across the country at the start of 1976. Memo by Peggy C. Davis, NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., January 2, 1976 (on file with Death Penalty Policy Project). Woodson and Roberts took 326 people in ten states off of LDF’s death-row list. However, more than 250 new death sentences imposed during the course of 1976, and the national death-row population was 358 at the start of 1977. See Memo by Peggy C. Davis and Norma M. Lewis, NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., January 18, 1977 (on file with Death Penalty Policy Project). The 53-person decline in calendar year 1976 amounted to a 12.9% one-year reduction in the U.S. death-row population.
↩︎ - NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., Death Row USA, May 1988 (on file with Death Penalty Policy Project).
↩︎ - See Death Penalty Information Center, Executions by State and Region Since 1976.
↩︎ - The White House, FACT SHEET: President Biden Commutes the Sentences of 37 Individuals on Death Row, December 23, 2024.
↩︎ - Press Release, Governor Cooper Takes Capital Clemency Actions, Office of the Governor (North Carolina), December 31, 2024.
↩︎ - See map of humanitarian grants of clemency, Death Penalty Information Center, Clemency.
↩︎ - NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., Death Row USA, August 1988 (reporting 1,976 active death sentences) (on file with Death Penalty Policy Project). The August 1988 edition of DRUSA recorded 2,110 people in its national death row census, of whom 134 had convictions or death sentences that had been overturned in the courts but still faced possible reimposition of the death penalty in appellate or capital resentencing proceedings.
↩︎ - Furman v. Georgia, 408 US 238 (1972).
↩︎ - Compare NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., Death Row USA, Winter 2003 (3,692 death-row prisoners as of January 1, 2003) with NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., Death Row USA, Winter 2004 (3,503 death-row prisoners as of January 1, 2004).
↩︎ - Compare NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., Death Row USA, Winter 2022 (2,436 death-row prisoners as of January 1, 2022) with Legal Defense Fund, Death Row USA, Winter 2023 (2,331 death-row prisoners as of January 1, 2023).
↩︎ - Press Release, Governor Kate Brown Commutes Oregon’s Death Row, Governor’s Office (Oregon), December 13, 2022.
↩︎ - DRUSA also identified two deaths in custody and one noncapital resentencing from prior years that it was unaware of at the start of 2024.
↩︎ - DRUSA reported 600 people on death row or facing capital resentencing proceedings in California as of July 1, 2001. NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., Death Row USA, Summer 2001 (on file with Death Penalty Policy Project). The Spring 2001 DRUSA census reported 592 people on California’s death row as of April 1, 2001. NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., Death Row USA, Spring 2001 (on file with Death Penalty Policy Project).
↩︎ - See Death Penalty Information Center, Death Sentences in the United States Since 1973.
↩︎ - Sentencing data is from the Death Penalty Information Center’s Death Penalty Census, as reported on DPIC’s sentencing information page, note 17, above. Execution data for 1972 through 2022 is from the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Tracy L. Snell, Capital Punishment, 2022 – Statistical Tables, Appendix Table 4, Number of prisoners executed in the United States, 1930–2022, U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2023 and 2024 execution data is from Death Penalty Policy Project case monitoring. In Table 1, years with 50 or fewer new death sentences, 30 or fewer executions, and a death sentence to execution ratio below 2.0:1 are highlighted in yellow. Years with a death sentence to execution ratio between 2.0 and 2.25:1 are highlighted in paler yellow. Peak years for new death sentences (275 or more) and executions (more than 70) are highlighted in red-brown, and years in which there were between 250 and 274 new death sentences and 65-70 executions are highlighted in paler red-brown.
↩︎ - On July 11, a Volusia County judge sentenced Julio Rivera to die, disregarding the life votes of four jurors. In Highlands County, a trial judge imposed a death sentence on Zephen Xaver on December 16 even though one quarter of his jury had voted for life. No other state permits a judge to impose a death sentence based on a death-sentencing recommendation by fewer than 10 jurors.
↩︎ - Lajeromeny Brown and Michael Mitchell were sentenced to death on January 12 and June 25, 2024 following 10-2 jury votes for death. Marco Perez was sentenced to death on March 18, 2024 after an 11-1 jury vote.
↩︎ - In addition to the death sentences described above in note 19, Michael Hunt and Markas Fishburne were sentenced to death on January 19 and June 13, respectively, following non-unanimous 10-2 jury votes; Patrick McDowell was sentenced to death on July 17 following an 11-1 jury vote; and Wade Wilson received death sentences on two counts of murder on August 27 after non-unanimous jury votes of 9-3 and 10-2.
↩︎ - Jeremy Williams, sentenced to death in Alabama on April 15, 2024, and Richard Bishop, sentenced to death in Florida on September 16, 2024.
↩︎ - Chad Daybell, sentenced to death in Idaho on June 1, 2024.
↩︎ - Patrick McDowell, sentenced to death in Florida on July 17, 2024.
↩︎ - Travis Mullis, executed in Texas on September 24, 2024; Derrick Dearman, executed in Alabama on October 17, 2024; and Joseph Corcoran, executed in Indiana on December 18, 2024.
↩︎ - The Death Penalty Information Center identifies 166 executions of volunteers out of the 1607 executions in the modern death penalty era (10.3%). See Death Penalty Information Center, Execution Database (search filtered for “volunteers”), last visited January 22, 2025.
↩︎ - Those states are: Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and Washington.
↩︎ - See also the executions of Eric Robert (10/15/2012) and Rodney Berget (10/29/2018) in South Dakota after 5 years, 3 months and 6 years, respectively; the execution of Gerald Bordelon in Louisiana (1/07/2010) after 7 years, 8 months; the execution of David Cox in Mississippi (11/17/2021) after 9 years, 5 months; the execution of Marco Chapman in Kentucky (11/21/2008) after 9 years, 6 months; and the execution of Carey Dean Moore in Nebraska (8/14/2018) after 20 years, 8 months.
↩︎ - Jeffrey M. Jones, Drop in Death Penalty Support Led by Younger Generations, Gallup.com, November 14, 2024 (according to Gallup’s October 2024 annual crime survey, “overall support for the death penalty in the U.S. has fallen to 53% today, a level not seen since the early 1970s”).
↩︎ - Megan Brenan, New 47% Low Say Death Penalty Is Fairly Applied in U.S., Gallup.com, November 6, 2023 (data from Gallup’s October 2023 annual crime survey). Even with near record-low death sentences, 56% of Gallup respondents said that the death penalty was being imposed “too often” or “about the right amount.” Id.
↩︎ - Jeffrey M. Jones, Drop in Death Penalty Support Led by Younger Generations, Gallup.com, November 14, 2024.
Gallup reports that “there are now double-digit gaps in death penalty support between people with the same political party identification from different generations.” Generation Z and Millennial Republicans support the death penalty at a rate 13 percentage points lower than their Generation X and older compatriots. The same gap is present among those identifying as Independents. Democrats as a whole oppose capital punishment, but even for them, support is 11 percentage points lower among their Generation Z and Millennial members. Id. ↩︎