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Capital punishment in the United States

This article is about an overview of capital punishment amongst all jurisdictions in the United States. For capital punishment by the federal government, see Capital punishment by the United States federal government.

Without the death penalty:
  Capital punishment repealed, never instituted, or struck down as unconstitutional (23 states, 5 territories)[a]
With the death penalty:
  Capital punishment in statute, but executions formally suspended (8 states)
  Capital punishment in statute, but no executions within the last 10 years (6 states, 1 territory)
  Capital punishment in statute, but executions informally suspended (1 state)
  Capital punishment in statute and executions carried out within the last 10 years (12 states)
Map displaying the status of capital punishment since 1970 by jurisdiction:
  Capital punishment abolished or struck down
  Capital punishment is a legal penalty.

In the United States, capital punishment (also known as the death penalty) is a legal penalty in 27 states, throughout the country at the federal level, and in American Samoa.[b][1] It is also a legal penalty for some military offenses. Capital punishment has been abolished in 23 states and in the federal capital, Washington, D.C.[2] It is usually applied for only the most serious crimes, such as aggravated murder. Although it is a legal penalty in 27 states, 19 of them have authority to execute death sentences, with the other 8, as well as the federal government and military, subject to moratoriums.

As of 2024, of the 38 OECD member countries, only two (the United States and Japan) allow capital punishment.[3] Taiwan and Israel are the only other advanced democracies with capital punishment; in 2024 Taiwan's Constitutional Court upheld the legality of the death penalty, but restricted its use to the most serious crimes.[4]

The existence of capital punishment in the United States can be traced to early colonial Virginia.[5] There were no executions in the United States between 1967 and 1977. In 1972, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down capital punishment statutes in Furman v. Georgia, reducing all pending death sentences to life imprisonment at the time.[6] Subsequently, a majority of states enacted new death penalty statutes, and the court affirmed the legality of the practice in the 1976 case Gregg v. Georgia. Since then, more than 8,700 defendants have been sentenced to death;[7] of these, more than 1,550 have been executed.[8][9] At least 190 people who were sentenced to death since 1972 have since been exonerated, about 2.2% or one in 46.[10][11] As of April 13, 2022, about 2,400 to 2,500 convicts are still on death row.[12]

The Trump administration's Department of Justice announced its plans to resume executions for federal crimes in 2019. On July 14, 2020, Daniel Lewis Lee became the first inmate executed by the federal government since 2003.[13] Thirteen federal death row inmates were executed, all under Trump. The last and most recent federal execution was of Dustin Higgs, who was executed on January 16, 2021.[14] On July 1, 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that a moratorium on the federal death penalty was being reinstated.[15] As of March 2024, there were 40 inmates on federal death row.[16]


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  1. ^ "Death Penalty States [2022]". Death Penalty Info. Retrieved September 8, 2022.
  2. ^ "States and capital punishment". National Conference of State Legislatures. Retrieved June 23, 2017.
  3. ^ "Why Japan retains the death penalty". The Economist. April 26, 2022. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved June 18, 2024.
  4. ^ Time
  5. ^ Rigby, David; Seguin, Charles (March 2021). "Capital Punishment and the Legacies of Slavery and Lynching in the United States". The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 694 (1): 205–219. doi:10.1177/00027162211016277. ISSN 0002-7162. S2CID 235760878.
  6. ^ Latzer, Barry (October 27, 2010). Death Penalty Cases: Leading U.S. Supreme Court Cases on Capital Punishment. Elsevier. p. 37. ISBN 978-0-12-382025-9.
  7. ^ "Death Sentences in the United States From 1977 By State and By Year". Death Penalty Information Center. Retrieved April 24, 2017.
  8. ^ "Execution Statistics Summary – State and Year". people.smu.edu/rhalperi/. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
  9. ^ "Georgia inmate is the 1,500th person executed in the US since the death penalty was reinstated". CNN. June 21, 2019. Retrieved June 21, 2019.
  10. ^ "Innocence: List of Those Freed From Death Row". Death Penalty Information Center. Archived from the original on May 13, 2019. Retrieved May 13, 2019.
  11. ^ Dwyer-Moss, Jessica (2013). "Flawed Forensics and the Death Penalty: Junk Science and Potentially Wrongful Executions", Seattle Journal for Social Justice: Vol. 11, Iss. 2, Article 10. p. 760.
  12. ^ Fins, Deborah. "DEATH ROW U.S.A. Spring 2022: A quarterly report by Legal Defense Fund" (PDF). NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Retrieved January 2, 2023.
  13. ^ "US Executes First Federal Prisoner, Convicted Of Murder, In 17 Years". www.ndtv.com. Retrieved July 14, 2020.
  14. ^ Allen, Jonathan; Acharya, Bhargav (January 16, 2021). "U.S. carries out 13th and final execution under Trump administration". Reuters. Retrieved January 16, 2021.
  15. ^ "Attorney General Merrick B. Garland Imposes a Moratorium on Federal Executions; Orders Review of Policies and Procedures | OPA | Department of Justice". Justice.gov. July 1, 2021. Retrieved June 29, 2022.
  16. ^ "List of Federal Death-Row Prisoners". deathpenaltyinfo.org. Death Penalty Information Center. Retrieved May 11, 2021.

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