January 31, 2025
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Robert Dunham at r.dunham@phillipsblack.org
A new Death Penalty Policy Project analysis of 50 years of data on death sentences, executions, and the size of the U.S. death-row population has found that U.S. death row experienced its largest population decline in 20 years in 2024, and its highest one-year percentage decline in nearly a half-century.
According to the Winter 2025 quarterly census of the U.S. death row population released this month by the Legal Defense Fund, the number of men and women on death rows or facing potential capital sentencing retrials across the United States as of January 1, 2025 dropped to 2,092, a decline of 149 people from the organization’s January 2024 census. It was the first time in 36 years that LDF had reported fewer than 2,100 people in the United States with active death sentences or facing possible capital resentencing.
2024 marked the 24th consecutive year in which the size of the U.S. death-row population has decreased. Overall, the U.S. death row population has declined 44% from its peak of 3,726 in January 2001.
The historic decline occurred despite executions remaining at levels not seen since 1991. The 25 executions in 2024 were the ninth year in a row in which fewer than 30 prisoners were put to death.
“The evidence continues to mount that the U.S. death penalty has become unsustainable,” said Robert Dunham, the Death Penalty Policy Project’s director. “New death sentences have declined so much that they are no longer replenishing the death-row population, even with generationally low numbers of executions.”
The death-row population decline in 2024 was second largest since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all existing death penalty statutes in 1972, clearing the nation’s death rows. The only year since then with a larger death-row population decline was 2003, when Illinois Gov. George Ryan commuted the death sentences of 167 death-row prisoners and pardoned four others. The 6.6% one-year drop in the U.S. death-row population in 2024 represents the largest single-year percentage decline in 48 years, since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the mandatory death sentencing statutes of 10 states in 1976.
As in 2003, the historic level of the death-row population decline was fueled by groundbreaking executive grants of clemency. On December 23, President Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 federal death-row prisoners, resentencing them to life without parole. On December 31, Gov. Roy Cooper followed with commutations of 15 North Carolina death sentences, commuting more death sentences in a single day than any southern state had commuted over the course of the previous fifty years.
Even with the landmark commutations, however, more people came off death row as a result of non-capital dispositions of death sentences that had been overturned in the courts — a pattern that has been consistent for the past 20 years. The individuals removed from LDF’s death-row census reports in 2024 included 72 cases from ten states in which individuals previously sentenced to death were resentenced to life or less or exonerated, as well as 24 death-sentenced prisoners in six states who died in custody.
“As death row declines, the states that are imposing and carrying out death sentences are resorting to aberrant and untrustworthy practices like non-unanimous sentences and secret drug deals,” Dunham said. “But sentencing people to death when one-quarter or one-third of their jurors have voted for life or hiding execution practices from the light of day only strengthens the public view that governments are incapable of fairly and competently administering capital punishment. That’s just another reason why most of the U.S. continues to move away from the death penalty.”
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The DP3 Analysis: U.S. death row experiences largest population decline in 20 years, highest percentage decline in half-century can be found at these links on the Death Penalty Policy Project (DP3) Substack or on the DP3 website. To read more Death Penalty Policy Project analyses, go to the DP3 Substack at this link: https://dppolicy.substack.com/publish/home
The Death Penalty Policy Project (“DP3”) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization housed within the Phillips Black Inc. public interest legal practice. DP3 provides cutting edge information, analysis, and critical commentary on capital punishment in the United States.