Statistics on capital punishment in the United States show a system that is shrinking at the sentencing end and uneven at the execution end. Roughly 2,100 people sit on death row across 26 states and the federal Bureau of Prisons, courts handed down just 26 new death sentences in 2024, and executions rebounded sharply to 47 in 2025 after years in the low double digits. Racial disparities on death row have held steady for decades, exonerations now run at roughly one for every eight executions, and the average condemned person waits nearly 19 years between sentencing and execution.
How Many People Are on Death Row
At the end of 2023, 26 states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons held 2,192 people under a sentence of death, a 3 percent drop from the 2,270 recorded a year earlier.1Bureau of Justice Statistics. Capital Punishment, 2023 – Statistical Tables Current estimates place the total around 2,100. Removals from death row — through natural deaths, resentencings, and the occasional execution — outpace the trickle of new death sentences coming in. Courts imposed 26 new death sentences nationwide in 2024, down from the roughly 300 per year that were common in the mid-1990s.
The federal portion of that total changed almost overnight in December 2024, when President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people then on federal death row to life without parole. Only three individuals remain under a federal death sentence.2Death Penalty Information Center. List of Federal Death Row Prisoners The Department of Justice announced in April 2026 that it was ending the federal execution moratorium that Attorney General Garland had imposed in July 2021. Whether those three sentences will be carried out is an open question.
A separate military death row operates at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for service members sentenced under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.3U.S. Army Publishing Directorate. AR 190-55 – U.S. Army Corrections System Procedures for Military Executions No military execution has been carried out since 1961.
Executions Per Year Since 1976
The modern era of capital punishment opened with the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Gregg v. Georgia, which lifted a four-year moratorium set in motion by Furman v. Georgia in 1972.4Justia. Gregg v. Georgia, 428 US 153 (1976) States rewrote their statutes, and executions resumed.
Annual totals climbed through the 1980s and 1990s. In 1999, 20 states carried out 98 executions, the highest single-year total since 1951.5Bureau of Justice Statistics. Capital Punishment, 1999 From there the numbers fell steadily. By the early 2020s, annual totals ran between 11 and 24. The year 2021 brought just 11 executions, the lowest figure in decades.
That downward trend reversed in 2025, when 47 executions were carried out nationwide. States that had accumulated backlogs of exhausted-appeal cases moved forward on scheduling, and the lethal-injection drug-supply problems that stalled executions in earlier years eased in some jurisdictions. Whether 2025 marks a new trend or a one-year spike is too early to tell.
Where Executions Actually Happen
Twenty-seven states currently authorize the death penalty, and 23 have abolished it through legislation or court rulings. Washington abolished the death penalty in 2023, Virginia in 2021, and Colorado in 2020. Among the 27 that retain it, several operate under gubernatorial moratoria, meaning sentences are still imposed but executions are not carried out. California, Oregon, and Pennsylvania all fall into that category.
Execution activity concentrates in a handful of states. Texas has carried out roughly 600 executions since 1976, far more than any other jurisdiction. Oklahoma has executed more than 125 people in that span, and Virginia carried out 113 before abolishing the penalty in 2021. Those three states alone account for more than half of all executions in the modern era.
Death row populations tell a different story. California holds the largest death row at approximately 580 people, despite not having executed anyone since 2006.6Bureau of Justice Statistics. Capital Punishment, 2023 – Statistical Tables Florida’s death row has shrunk to about 249 as of early 2026, down from more than 300 a few years earlier. Texas, which executes at a far higher rate, keeps a comparatively smaller death row because cases move through the system faster there.
The concentration gets starker at the county level. Fewer than 2 percent of all U.S. counties account for more than half of the executions carried out since 1976. Capital punishment is less a statewide practice than a local one, driven by a small number of counties with aggressive prosecutorial offices.
Who Is on Death Row
The racial makeup of death row does not mirror the country. Non-Hispanic White individuals make up about 43 percent of the death row population, and non-Hispanic Black individuals make up roughly 40 percent, according to the most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics data.6Bureau of Justice Statistics. Capital Punishment, 2023 – Statistical Tables Hispanic individuals of any race account for approximately 14.5 percent, with Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander individuals making up the remaining small share. Black Americans are about 13 percent of the general population and 40 percent of death row, a gap that has held for decades.
Women account for about 2 percent of the total. As of late 2025, 47 women were under a death sentence nationwide.7Death Penalty Information Center. Women That ratio has stayed roughly steady across the modern era. Most jurisdictions house condemned women in separate units within women’s correctional facilities rather than in dedicated death row buildings.
How Long People Wait
The average time between sentencing and execution has grown dramatically. As of 2020, the most recent year with comprehensive data, the average was 18.9 years, up from 11.4 years in 2000. More than half of everyone currently on death row has been there for over 18 years. In the first years after Gregg, the median was measured in single-digit years.
The expansion reflects both the complexity of modern capital litigation and policy choices about how many layers of review a death sentence should survive. Capital cases pass through a direct appeal in state court, a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, state habeas corpus proceedings, and federal habeas review. If any court at any stage reverses the conviction or sentence, portions of the clock may restart. Capital cases also carry a reversal rate far higher than other criminal cases, which is part of why the layered process exists.
Exonerations
At least 200 people sentenced to death in the United States have been exonerated since 1973. That works out to roughly one exoneration for every eight executions carried out in the modern era. More than half of those exonerees are Black. The causes mirror wrongful convictions in other serious cases: flawed eyewitness identifications, false confessions, unreliable forensic evidence, and inadequate defense representation.
What Capital Cases Cost
Capital trials cost significantly more than non-capital murder prosecutions. A 2025 review by the Indiana Legislative Services Agency found that trying a death penalty case cost roughly eight times more than a case seeking life without parole. A 2021 Ohio legislative study put the multiplier at 2.5 to 5 times, with individual cases running $1 million to $3 million more than comparable non-capital prosecutions. The added expense comes from longer investigations, more expert witnesses, the bifurcated guilt-and-penalty trial structure, and the mandatory multi-stage appeals process. One study found the time from charging to final sentencing in capital cases ran nearly four times longer than in non-capital cases.
Costs continue after trial. Death row housing is more expensive than general population housing because of heightened security and single-cell accommodations, and the appeals process generates years of additional legal costs on both sides. States that retain the death penalty but rarely carry it out, such as California, absorb the full expense of the system.
Clemency Grants Are Rare
Of nearly 10,000 individuals sentenced to death since 1972, fewer than 90 have had their sentences commuted through individual grants of clemency. That is below 1 percent. Eleven states that retain the death penalty have never granted an individual clemency in the entire modern era. Politics shape the timing: between 1977 and 2021, more than half of individual clemency grants happened when the governor was not running for re-election, and that figure rises to nearly 85 percent in states where the governor has sole clemency authority.
The December 2024 Biden commutations were different in kind. Those 37 grants were categorical rather than individual, covering nearly everyone on federal death row at once, and they reshaped the federal capital population overnight.
Public Opinion Has Shifted
Public support for the death penalty has fallen well off its modern high. Gallup measured support at 80 percent in 1994. By October 2025, that figure had fallen to 52 percent, with 44 percent opposed. When pollsters offer life without parole as an explicit alternative, support drops further. The near-even split tracks with the broader decline in death sentences and executions, and it has reshaped the political math in many jurisdictions, making abolition votes easier for legislators and death-penalty prosecutions harder for prosecutors to justify.