The death penalty is used in the United States far less often than its legal availability suggests. In 2025, 47 people were executed across 11 states, the highest annual total in more than 15 years, and courts handed down roughly 23 new death sentences. Twenty-seven states still authorize capital punishment, but roughly 2,000 people sit on death row waiting out appeals that typically run two decades or longer, and most of the actual executions happen in a small cluster of Southern states.
Yearly Execution Counts and the Long Trend
Executions climbed through the 1980s and 1990s and peaked at 98 in 1999, the highest single-year total since 1951.1Bureau of Justice Statistics. Capital Punishment, 1999 From that peak the numbers fell steadily. Annual totals dropped below 50 by 2007, below 30 by 2016, and bottomed out at 11 in 2021.
Several forces drove the decline at once. Pharmaceutical companies cut off supplies of lethal injection drugs. Public support softened. Prosecutors increasingly accepted life without parole instead of pursuing capital charges. Courts tightened procedural requirements for capital trials.
That trajectory reversed sharply in 2025, when 47 executions were carried out. Florida alone accounted for 19 of them, more than the entire national total in some recent years. The 2026 pace has slowed, with 7 executions carried out through late May. Whether 2025 marks the start of an upswing or a one-year spike depends on how aggressively states schedule warrants and how many pending legal challenges succeed.
Which States Actually Execute People
Geography drives almost everything about whether a death sentence leads to an execution. Twenty-seven states authorize the penalty, but only 11 carried one out in 2025, and five states accounted for the overwhelming majority:
- Florida: 19 executions, the most for any state in a single year in over a decade
- Alabama: 5 executions, including several using nitrogen gas
- South Carolina: 5 executions, up from 2 the prior year
- Texas: 5 executions, a historically low figure for the state that has long led the country
- Tennessee: 3 executions
Texas still holds the all-time lead in modern executions by a wide margin, but Florida’s 2025 surge shows how quickly the picture can shift when a governor and attorney general prioritize clearing a backlog of warrants.
At the other end sit states where the penalty exists on paper but not in practice. California holds the nation’s largest death row population and has not executed anyone since 2006. Pennsylvania’s governor has continued an executive hold on executions stretching back over a decade. Oregon keeps the penalty available but under a similar moratorium. Since 2009, seven states have ended capital punishment through legislation: New Mexico, Illinois, Connecticut, Maryland, New Hampshire, Colorado, and Virginia.
New Death Sentences Each Year
Execution counts tell only part of the story. The number of new death sentences handed down each year has collapsed. In the mid-1990s, courts imposed more than 300 new death sentences annually. By 2025, that figure had fallen to 23, a decline of more than 90 percent.
Prosecutors in every death penalty state now have life without parole available as a severe alternative that avoids the complications of capital litigation. The cost of a capital trial, which requires a separate sentencing phase, expert witnesses, and years of mandatory appeals, strains county budgets. Public defenders have also become more effective at presenting mitigating evidence during the penalty phase, making juries less likely to choose death.
With 20 to 30 new sentences a year and executions, natural deaths, and reversals removing more than that annually, death rows are slowly emptying from both ends.
Death Row Size and Time Served
Roughly 2,000 people are currently on death row, down from a peak of about 3,600 in the early 2000s. At yearend 2022, the Bureau of Justice Statistics counted 2,270 across 26 states and the federal system.2Bureau of Justice Statistics. Capital Punishment, 2022 – Statistical Tables The population has declined for more than 20 consecutive years.
More than half of all current death row prisoners have been confined for over 18 years. For many on California’s death row, the sentence functions as life imprisonment under a different name.
Black defendants make up roughly 41 percent of the death row population despite representing about 13 percent of the U.S. population. White defendants account for approximately 42 percent, and Latino defendants about 15 percent. Research has consistently shown that the race of the victim also matters: cases involving white victims are significantly more likely to result in a death sentence than cases with Black victims, even after controlling for the severity of the crime.
Federal Executions
The federal government has historically been a minor player. Between 1963 and 2019, only three federal executions took place. That changed between July 2020 and January 2021, when the federal government executed 13 people in six months, more than in the prior six decades combined. Federal death sentences are governed by 18 U.S.C. ยง 3596, which requires the sentence to be carried out under the law of the state where the conviction occurred.3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 3596 – Implementation of a Sentence of Death
In July 2021, the Biden administration imposed a moratorium on federal executions. Before leaving office in January 2025, President Biden commuted 37 federal death sentences to life without parole, effectively emptying most of federal death row.
The Trump administration reversed course immediately. An executive order issued on January 20, 2025, directed the Attorney General to pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use, with particular emphasis on murders of law enforcement officers and capital crimes committed by noncitizens.4The White House. Restoring The Death Penalty And Protecting Public Safety The Department of Justice has since lifted the moratorium, reinstated the prior execution protocol using pentobarbital, authorized death penalty prosecution against 44 defendants, and directed the Bureau of Prisons to expand its execution methods.5U.S. Department of Justice. The Justice Department Takes Actions to Strengthen the Federal Death Penalty Whether these measures lead to resumed federal executions depends on how quickly new cases move through the courts.
Military executions are a separate and much narrower category. The last one took place in 1961.
Why Executions Lag So Far Behind Sentences
The gap between a death sentence and an execution is measured in decades. A capital case typically moves through a direct appeal in state court, state post-conviction review, and then federal habeas review, each stage with its own procedural requirements. Capital cases have a reversal rate far higher than other criminal cases, and the appeals process regularly catches ineffective defense counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, withheld evidence, and flawed jury instructions.
Those years of review are also what makes exonerations possible. Since 1973, more than 200 people have been exonerated and released from death row after evidence of their innocence emerged, roughly one exoneration for every eight executions. Half of those exonerations took more than a decade, and since 2013, more than half have taken 25 years or longer. Some prisoners spent 30 years on death row before DNA testing, recanted witness testimony, or newly discovered prosecutorial misconduct proved they were wrongly convicted.
The Trump administration’s DOJ has proposed a rule to accelerate federal habeas review in state capital cases, potentially cutting years from the timeline.5U.S. Department of Justice. The Justice Department Takes Actions to Strengthen the Federal Death Penalty Critics argue a faster process raises the risk of executing innocent people. Supporters say the current timeline undermines the penalty’s purpose. Either way, the long lag between sentence and execution is the single biggest reason the number of people on death row dwarfs the number put to death each year.