California has the most death row inmates of any state, with roughly 585 to 600 people under an active death sentence depending on the reporting date. That is more than double the next-closest state, Florida, and it reflects a peculiar dynamic: California keeps sentencing people to death but has not executed anyone since 2006.
California’s Death Row by the Numbers
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation estimated 598 people with active death sentences as of February 2025, a figure that includes some inmates awaiting formal transfer after being resentenced. At the end of 2023, the Bureau of Justice Statistics counted 653 people on California’s death row. The drop between those two figures reflects a wave of resentencings: California courts moved at least 45 people off death row in 2024 alone, mostly to life sentences. The state’s death row shrank more in that single year than in any year since the current capital statute took effect.
Only 13 people have been executed in California since the death penalty was reinstated nationwide in 1976. Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order in March 2019 granting a reprieve to every person on the state’s death row, and that moratorium remains in effect. The order does not pardon anyone or alter sentences. It simply means no execution dates get scheduled while it stands. Advocates have pushed Newsom to commute all death sentences to life without parole before his term ends, since a future governor could reverse the moratorium with a signature.
The combination explains the backlog. For four decades, California juries kept imposing death sentences, and almost none of those sentences ever reached an execution chamber. The population built up because the exit was effectively closed.
The Rest of the Top Eight
After California, the numbers drop sharply. Eight states hold 100 or more people on death row, and together they account for the overwhelming share of the national total of roughly 2,100.
- California: about 585 to 598 in early 2025, down from 653 at the end of 2023.
- Florida: 287 at the end of 2023, dropping to about 244 by mid-2026 after the state resumed a more active execution schedule under Governor DeSantis.
- Texas: 180 at the end of 2023, with a gradual decline continuing through 2025.
- Alabama: 158 at the end of 2023, disproportionately large relative to the state’s population.
- North Carolina: 136 at the end of 2023, falling to about 124 by spring 2025.
- Ohio: 120 at the end of 2023.
- Arizona: 111 at the end of 2023.
- Pennsylvania: 96 at the end of 2023, though counts that include people in resentencing proceedings place the figure closer to 106.
Below those eight, Louisiana held 60 people, Nevada 52, and Tennessee 45 at the end of 2023. Georgia, Mississippi, and Oklahoma each held 36 or 37. Every one of these populations has been shrinking, though at different rates depending on whether the state is actively executing, resentencing, or doing neither.
Why the Biggest Death Row Isn’t the Most Active
A large death row population does not translate into frequent executions. Of the 27 states that still have the death penalty on the books, only about a third have carried out an execution in the past decade. In 2025, 11 states performed executions.
Texas and Florida operate at the opposite end of the spectrum from California. Both schedule and carry out executions once appeals are exhausted, which keeps their death row populations in constant churn. Texas has executed more people than any other state since 1976, and its death row has gradually shrunk as new sentences slow. Florida’s aggressive 2025–2026 pace under Governor DeSantis cut its death row by more than 40 people in roughly two and a half years.
Practical barriers slow executions even in states that want to proceed. Pharmaceutical companies have increasingly refused to sell drugs for lethal injections, leaving states to work with supplies that may be expiring or untested. Some have authorized the electric chair, nitrogen gas, or the gas chamber as backup methods. In April 2026, the federal Department of Justice directed the Bureau of Prisons to expand its execution protocol to include firing squads and to evaluate new execution facilities.
How Long People Spend on Death Row
The time between a death sentence and an execution has roughly tripled since 1990. The average wait that year was about eight years. By 2021, it had climbed to nearly 20. That stretch reflects a multi-layered appeals process most legal scholars consider a necessary safeguard given that executions cannot be undone.
After sentencing, a capital case moves through a direct appeal to the state’s highest court, then typically into state post-conviction proceedings where the defense can raise issues like ineffective counsel or newly discovered evidence. If those fail, the case can enter federal habeas corpus review, which examines whether the conviction or sentence violated constitutional rights. Each stage can take years, and courts grant relief more often than people realize. Roughly half of all death sentences imposed since the 1970s have ultimately been reversed or vacated at some stage of appeal.
The practical effect is that death row functions, for many inmates, less like an antechamber to execution than a decades-long form of isolated confinement. Some die of natural causes or illness before their appeals are resolved. Others are eventually resentenced to life without parole after courts find errors in their original trials. In California, that second outcome has become the dominant one.
The National Picture Is Shrinking
The American death penalty is contracting by nearly every measure. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have abolished capital punishment, with Virginia becoming the most recent to do so legislatively in 2021. Several other states, including Oregon and Delaware, still have death penalty statutes on the books but have not pursued new capital cases in years because of court rulings or executive policy.
New death sentences have fallen dramatically. Courts imposed just 26 nationwide in 2024, down from a peak of more than 300 per year in the mid-1990s. The overall death row population has been declining for more than two decades as resentencings, reversals, and natural deaths outpace new arrivals. At the end of 2023, the BJS counted 2,192 people under a sentence of death. By early 2025, that figure had fallen below 2,100.
Public opinion tracks the numbers. Polling consistently shows that a slim majority of Americans still support the death penalty in the abstract, but support drops significantly when life without parole is offered as an alternative. Prosecutors in many large urban counties have effectively stopped seeking death sentences, which concentrates new capital cases in a shrinking group of jurisdictions. A handful of counties in states like California, Florida, and Texas produce a disproportionate share of all new death sentences nationally.
That concentration is part of why California’s death row stays so large even as the national count falls. Counties that still pursue capital charges keep feeding the system, and the state’s moratorium ensures almost none leave through the execution chamber. Until either the sentencing pace slows further or the sentences themselves are commuted, California will keep holding the largest death row in the country by a wide margin.