Capital punishment

SIGNIFICANCE: Capital punishment has been one of the most debated topics in criminal justice policy in the United States, which at the beginning of the twenty-first century was one of the few remaining Western democracies still to employ the death penalty. Debates over the legal, moral, ethical, and economic ramifications of the death penalty are ongoing.

While the use of capital punishment as a criminal justice policy has been substantially reduced or eliminated in many countries around the world—by 2023, according to Amnesty International, 146 countries had abolished the death penalty in practice or law—in fifty-six countries the death penalty continued to be used as the ultimate punishment for criminal behavior. That year, at least 1,153 executions were carried out worldwide.

Between 1608 and 1976, the number of people legally executed in what is now the United States has been estimated to be nearly 15,000. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, from 1976 to early 2024, 1,584 executions were carried out in the United States, the vast majority of them in southern states. In January 2022, approximately 2,436 people who had been sentenced to death were being held on death rows across the United States. In February 2024, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, twenty-seven states (not counting Virginia, which abolished the death penalty that month, effective July 1, 2021), the federal government, and the US military authorized the use of capital punishment. Although a small portion of states account for the majority of executions, seven of the jurisdictions—including the US military—conducted no executions at all between 1972 and 2003.

The federal government carried out its first execution since 2003 in July 2020, when it executed Daniel Lewis Lee, who had been convicted of murder, by lethal injection. Lee's execution was the first of thirteen that the administration of president Donald Trump carried out through January 15, 2021; of these executions, six took place after Trump lost his 2020 bid for re-election in November. Despite the Trump administration's push to carry out death sentences in the last six months of his term, the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to an overall reduction in the number of federal and state executions that took place in 2020.

As a presidential candidate in 2020, President Joe Biden pledged to eliminate the federal death penalty and give states incentives to do the same. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced in July 2021 that the US had stopped federal executions, and while there was a congressional bill to abolish the federal death penalty in 2021, it did not pass in the Senate, in which Democrats held a slim majority but not enough to overcome a Republican filibuster. Anti-death penalty activists continued to call on Biden to commute death sentences to life imprisonment and to close the federal facility in Terre Haute, Indiana, that houses federal prisoners on death row and administers federal executions.

Of the states with the death penalty, many also permit the sentencing of offenders to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Although the specific circumstances of death-eligible cases vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, few states authorize the use of capital punishment for offenses other than murder. At the federal level, the death penalty can be sought in aggravated murder and terrorism cases, as well as in four offenses that may not involve homicide: treason, espionage, large-scale drug trafficking, and attempted murder of officers, witnesses, or jurors in cases involving continuing criminal enterprises.

The majority of capital cases involve adult male offenders, but a small percentage of capital cases in the past have involved juvenile offenders. Twenty-two executions of offenders who committed their crimes when they were under the age of eighteen account for less than 2 percent of all executions carried out between 1976 and 2004. In 2004, seventy-two offenders on death rows in twelve states were considered juvenile offenders. The following year, the execution of people under the age of eighteen at the time of the crime was deemed illegal through the ruling in the case of Roper v. Simmons.

Women represent a small percentage of death-row prisoners and people convicted of felonies who are actually executed. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, eighteen women have been executed in the United States between 1976 and 2024, including Amber McLaughlin, who was executed in Missouri by lethal injection on January 3, 2023. McLaughlin's case was also notable as she was the first openly transgender person to be executed in the United States; she had transitioned while in prison after her conviction for rape and murder, and in official records was still listed under her name assigned at birth.

Capital Punishment in History

The history of capital punishment in the United States dates back to early colonial times. Early settlers were influenced by their British counterparts, whose laws mandated the death penalty for more than 150 separate crimes. While the laws on death sentencing varied from colony to colony, its practice was dramatically reduced in comparison to Britain. Massachusetts had one of the strictest laws on the books, with twelve crimes that were considered “death-eligible.” During the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 and 1693, Massachusetts executed nineteen people accused of witchcraft, and another man who refused to plead guilty or innocent.

In contrast, colonies dominated by Quakers were more lenient in their use of executions. They restricted the death penalty to cases of treason and murder. However, decisions to execute sparingly were not made solely for philosophical reasons, but because of the colonies’ need for able-bodied workers.

The number of executions in the United States increased significantly during the nineteenth century. However, the rate of executions reached its peak during the 1930s, when more than sixteen hundred people were put to death in the country.

Methods of Execution

Just as the policies on capital punishment have evolved from colonial times, so, too, have the methods by which executions are carried out. Early methods, such as burning at the stake and beheading, have since been ruled as unconstitutional on the grounds that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, by 2024, all states in the US with the death penalty used lethal injection as the primary method of execution. However, some states permitted executions "by any constitutional method" if lethal injection and other options were deemed unconstitutional or unavailable. Though lethal injection was the primary method, some states permitted executions using a gas chamber or electrocution. In 2001, the Supreme Court of Georgia ruled that the use of electrocution as a means of execution violated the state's constitution; the Supreme Court of Nebraska issued a similar ruling in 2008.

Lethal injection was created in an effort to provide a more humane and socially acceptable method of execution. Lethal injections generally use three drugs: sodium thiopental or pentobarbital sedates the person being executed; pancuronium bromide provides a total muscle relaxant and acts as a paralytic agent; and potassium chloride induces cardiac arrest, which results in death.

In 2014, a shortage of the drugs used for lethal injection (due in part to the European Union's refusal to export them to the United States) began to be a problem in many states, leading to botched executions involving experimental drug combinations in Ohio, Oklahoma, Arizona, Alabama, and Arkansas. These botched executions attracted an especially large amount of national—and international—attention to the United States’ capital punishment standards and procedures. These executions raised further concerns and questions regarding the types of drugs used as well as the definition of “cruel and unusual” punishment. As part of the response to such scrutiny and obstacles, some states began authorizing the use of nitrogen gas as an execution alternative, drawing further controversy and debate as the method was still considered experimental. Officials in Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Alabama, all states that had authorized the use of nitrogen gas by 2023, argued that it would be more humane and effective.

In late January 2024, the state of Alabama executed Kenneth Smith, a man convicted of murder in a 1988 contract killing, using nitrogen hypoxia. Smith was the first person executed using this method; while state officials described the execution as successful and humane, critics of capital punishment continued to voice concerns about this new execution method, as well as the continued use of the death penalty in the US and elsewhere.

Opposition to Capital Punishment

As executions surged during the nineteenth century, an anti-death-penalty movement also began to develop. During that period, several changes were made to the policies and practices of capital punishment that abolitionists viewed as progress toward its elimination in the United States. First, states began to change the processes by which death sentences were handed down. Up until that time, all the states utilized mandatory death sentencing for specific offenses. That practice changed in 1838, when Tennessee became the first state to change its capital sentencing policy to allow discretion in sentencing. In 1976, the US Supreme Court declared mandatory death sentences for first-degree murder to be unconstitutional in Woodson v. North Carolina.

The second nineteenth-century change came when several states limited the number of offenses that were considered death-eligible. Southern states expanded the use of capital punishment for enslaved persons, but the majority of states limited its use to crimes of murder and treason. In 1846, Michigan became the first state to abolish the death penalty for all crimes, with the exception of treason.

A third change was the transformation of executions from public to private events. Previously, hangings had traditionally been held in public squares in order to deter criminal activity, and religious readings and prayers provided a foundation for the occasions. However, public executions often created public disorder as a result of public drunkenness, botched executions, and rioting. In 1834, Pennsylvania became the first state to remove executions from public view. The last public execution in the United States was conducted in 1937. Now, public attendance at executions is limited to small numbers of citizens. Access by journalists is also limited, and legal efforts to televise executions to the public have failed.

In addition to policy changes that limited the use of capital punishment, several states began to abandon the practice in its entirety during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1852, Rhode Island became the first state to eliminate the use of the death penalty for all crimes. Other states later also abolished death penalty, some permanently, others only to reinstate it at later dates in response to political or public pressures. By 2023, twenty-three states and the District of Columbia did not have any death penalty statutes. An additional three states—California, Oregon, and Pennsylvania—had governor-imposed moratoriums on executions at that point. In March 2020, Colorado abolished the death penalty, followed by Virginia a year later.

In December 2022, Oregon governor Kate Brown commuted the sentences of seventeen people who had been sent to death row in favor of life in prison without parole. That same month, CNN reported that although support for the death penalty remained relatively high in the US, with 55 percent of Americans in favor of the death penalty for those convicted of murder, executions in the US, which numbered eighteen in 2022, were down 82 percent when compared to its peak of ninety-eight in 1999.

Supreme Court Decisions

A primary legal issue relating to capital punishment in the US is whether the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Before reviewing the constitutionality of the death penalty as a practice, the US Supreme Court addressed the question of how to define cruel and unusual punishment. In 1878, the Court ruled specific forms of torture as unconstitutional in its Wilkerson v. Utah decision. That ruling was explicit in specifying what types of execution procedures were cruel and unusual, but the Court’s later rulings were less specific.

In Weems v. United States (1910), the Court argued that decisions on what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment are not immutable and limited by the beliefs of the framers of the Bill of Rights. Rather, definitions should be subject to interpretation and change. The Court’s 1958 Trop v. Dulles ruling elaborated on this point, arguing that the definition of cruel and unusual should come from the evolving standards of decency as defined by modern society.

After the Trop ruling, measuring the evolving standards of decency led to several changes in death-penalty policy. In 1972, in Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court overturned state statutes on capital punishment nationwide in a 5–4 vote. The Court found that then-current laws violated the cruel and unusual clause of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. As other justices in the past had debated on the definition of cruel and unusual punishments, so, too, did the Furman Court. Justices William J. Brennan and Thurgood Marshall argued that the death penalty itself was inherently cruel and unusual, Justices William O. Douglas, Potter Stewart, and Byron R. White argued that the statutes themselves constituted cruel and unusual punishment as they were arbitrary and were implemented with wide degrees of discretion. With the Furman ruling, the death sentences of all the prisoners awaiting execution on death rows throughout the nation were invalidated.

After the Supreme Court’s Furman decision, legislators looked for ways of ensuring that capital punishment could be administered fairly and equitably, so that the death penalty could be reinstated. Newly written state statutes passed constitutional muster in several 1976 Supreme Court decisions, the most notable of which was Gregg v. Georgia. These new Court rulings allowed executions to continue.

The new state laws were designed to set standards for judges and juries in capital cases. First, a bifurcated process was to be conducted for all death-penalty trials, in which the guilt/innocence phases would be separated from the sentencing phases. Second, presentation of information on mitigating and aggravating factors was allowed during the sentencing phases, in which aggravating circumstances had to outweigh the mitigating circumstances before the death penalty could be awarded. Third, all death sentences became subject to automatic reviews by the states’ supreme courts. Finally, the states were required periodically to conduct studies of proportionality to determine whether disparities in sentencing were developing.

The conditions outlined in Gregg passed the constitutional requirements of the Court in 1976, but the Court’s justices continue to argue whether capital punishment itself represents cruel and unusual punishment. Later Court decisions continued to apply the criteria of the evolving standards of decency to limit which offenders may be subjected to capital punishment. In Penry v. Lynaugh in 1989, the Court held that the execution of individuals with intellectual disabilities did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment. However, the Court overturned this decision in 2002 in Atkins v. Virginia (2002). In its latter decision, the Court found that a national consensus had developed against the practice of executing individuals with intellectual disabilities and held that such a practice violates Eighth Amendment protections. Meanwhile, in 2021, there remained no federal restrictions against the execution of individuals with severe mental illness, though the American Psychiatric, Psychological, and Bar Associations all recommended against it. In January 2021 Ohio became the first state to enact legislation that prohibits capital punishment for people with severe mental illness at the time of their offense. By October 2021, two Ohio prisoners had been resentenced to life without parole in accordance with the new state law.

The Atkins v. Virginia ruling opened the possibility of other challenges to capital punishment. One example is the execution of juvenile offenders. In 1988, the Court held in Thompson v. Oklahoma that offenders under the age of sixteen at the time they commit their crimes are not eligible to receive death sentences. In 2002, four justices voted to hear the case of Kevin Nigel Stanford, who was seventeen at the time of his crime. Their dissenting opinion in Stanford v. Kentucky indicated that not only did they wish to revisit the issue of the juvenile death penalty, they were prepared to declare it as an unconstitutional practice. The state of Kentucky granted clemency to Stanford and commuted his death sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole, but the US Supreme Court was still left with the issue of the juvenile death penalty.

In 2003, Missouri’s supreme court, drawing largely on the rationale set forth in Atkins, declared juvenile executions unconstitutional. The Missouri court referenced public and professional opinion, as well as declining legislative support for capital punishment in its decision. On March 1, 2005, the US Supreme Court upheld the Missouri court ruling in a 5–4 decision in Roper v. Simmons. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy stated that to extinguish a juvenile’s life before he attains the maturity to understand his own humanity would be cruel and unusual punishment.

The Supreme Court continued to take on a variety of cases related to the death penalty throughout the 2010s and 2020s. Some of these cases, such as Kahler v. Kansas (2020), were related to due process and other widely applicable legal principles, while other cases, such as Nance v. Ward (2022), dealt with issues specific to death penalty cases. Specifically, the Court's ruling in Nance clarified the legal process for people condemned to death who sought to choose their method of execution. The Supreme Court was also occasionally tasked with upholding the death penalty in specific cases; for example, in United States v. Tsarnaev (2022), the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the perpetrators of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing. However, by 2024, Tsarnaev's death sentence was on hold.

Arguments for and Against Capital Punishment

Death-penalty supporters argue that capital punishment should be retained on the basis of retribution and deterrence. Most people who support the death penalty favor it because of the principle of retribution. Retribution is often described by the concept of lex talionis, or “an eye for an eye”—a principle holding that punishments must be proportionate responses to crimes. Lex talionis is also often associated with the concept of revenge.

Supporters of the death penalty argue that for justice to be served and for order to be restored to the community, society requires the execution of offenders as payment for their crimes. In contrast, death-penalty opponents argue that criminal justice policies should not be based on a retributive position because revenge is an emotional, rather than a reasonable, response. They further argue that the death penalty is a disproportionate response when compared to other sentencing philosophies, as the American system does not rape rapists or steal from thieves.

In contrast to the emotionally laden concept of retribution, deterrence is viewed as a more rational and scientific argument for capital punishment. Proponents are quick to argue that the death penalty provides for both specific and general deterrence. Not only do executions prevent convicted murderers from killing again, but the belief is that if murderers are executed, other potential murderers will think twice before committing murder, for fear of losing their own lives. However, deterrence theory assumes that all offenders are thinking individuals who rationally consider (and care about) the potential consequences of their actions before engaging in them.

Opponents to the death penalty argue that deterrence can be achieved by incarcerating offenders for life without the possibility of parole. Additionally, they argue that if the death penalty were, in fact, an effective deterrent, murder rates would increase when it is abolished and decline when it is restored. Proponents counteract this argument by stating that the death penalty as it is currently administered in the United States may not provide a deterrent effect because the average length of time that persons sentenced to death spend awaiting their executions is overly long. Based on data from the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) on murder rates by state, states without the death penalty consistently have lower murder rates than states with the death penalty.

Additionally, a botched lethal injection given to a prisoner on death row in Oklahoma attracted an especially large amount of national—and international—attention to the United States’ capital punishment standards and procedures in 2014. This event, combined with another chaotic execution performed in Ohio earlier in the year, raised further concerns and questions regarding the types of drugs used as well as the definition of “cruel and unusual” punishment. Controversy over ineffective execution methods, as well as the legal issues and human rights violations created by botched executions, continued into the 2020s; for example, in 2022, executioners in Alabama faced intense scrutiny after taking three hours to find a vein in a person condemned to die by lethal injection. By some estimates, a third of the eighteen executions carried out in in the US in 2022 were mishandled.

Wrongful Convictions

According to the Innocence Project, between 1973 and 2022, at least 190 prisoners were released from death row after new evidence demonstrated that they had been wrongfully convicted. Their releases seemed to refute arguments presented by supporters of capital punishment that only the guilty are sentenced to death row. In the state of Illinois, thirteen death-row prisoners were exonerated between 1977 and 2000, while twelve others were executed. Illinois governor George Ryan, previously a strong supporter of the death penalty, expressed concern that the system of handing out death sentences in his state may have allowed executions of the innocent, so he declared a moratorium on executions in 2000. Following a two-year investigation by a commission appointed by Ryan to review capital sentencing procedures, the commission made eighty-five recommendations on the processing of capital cases to ensure a system of fair, equitable, and accurate sentencing. Illinois incorporated some of those recommendations, but many, such as the immediate appointment of counsel, remained to be implemented. Meanwhile, following reviews of Illinois’s death-row population, Governor Ryan commuted the sentences of 156 prisoners awaiting execution to life in prison without parole.

The use of DNA testing has played an increasingly important role in proving wrongful convictions. The Innocence Project claimed that, by 2022, at least twenty-one people who had served time on death row had been exonerated by DNA testing.

Opponents of capital punishment in the US have also argued that the practice is marred by racial bias against defendants of color. Proponents of capital punishment disagree with the argument that it is administered in a discriminatory fashion, pointing out that about 56 percent of the prisoners who were executed in the United States between 1976 and 2022 were classified as White and 34 percent were Black, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. However, while the majority of prisoners and executions have involved White offenders, such statistics do not take into account the proportion of population demographics. Opponents argue that the death penalty is disproportionately applied to Black people (Black or African American alone or in combination), who constituted only 14.2 percent of the entire US population according to the 2020 US Census. A 2014 study from the University of Washington of criminal trials in that state found that jurors were three times more likely to recommend the death sentence for a Black defendant than a White defendant accused of a similar crime.

A review of post-Furman executions provided additional evidence for opponents of capital punishment who have argue that the death sentence is applied disproportionately to Black defendants. Between 1976 and 2022, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, roughly 50 percent of US murder victims were White but such more than 75 percent of all execution cases nationwide involved White victims.

Some critics of capital punishment charge that the death penalty is applied randomly, without concern for legal criteria. While proponents contend that the death penalty is applied in an equitable fashion, opponents disagree. Because the death penalty is actually invoked in only a small number of death-eligible cases, two different offenders who commit similar crimes may receive dramatically different sentences: death versus life imprisonment. Additionally, evidence demonstrates that the death penalty is subject to significant jurisdictional differences, as the majority of post-Furman executions have been carried out by southern states. Data from the Death Penalty Information Center showed that Texas alone accounted for more than 583 of all US executions between 1976 and mid-2023, out of a total of 1,570 executions carried out in the US during that time.

Conclusion

Even as capital punishment remains a subject of debate, raising issues such as deterrence, retribution, innocence, and discrimination, it remains a component of the American criminal justice system. According to data from Amnesty International, China has consistently been the world leader in capital punishment and is believed (in the absence of official statistics) to carry out thousands of executions per year. Based on known execution statistics, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the US (in that order) executed the next largest numbers of people in 2022. The US That year Amnesty International recorded 883 executions worldwide, an increase of over 50 percent compared to 2021 statistics; this figure did not include executions that took place in China. A 2023 Gallup poll showed that 53 percent of Americans supported the death penalty for murder, a figure that has largely trended downward since the end of the twentieth century. Questions of who should be executed, for what crimes, and by what methods have been addressed throughout American history and continue to be debated.

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