As of August 8, 2024, Texas has executed a total of 598 people since the reinstatement of capital punishment in the United States in 1976. Oklahoma had the second-highest number of executed inmates, with 125 executions carried out since 1976.

As of August 8, three executions were carried out by Alabama and two executions were carried out by Missouri in 2024. Another two executions were carried out in Oklahoma in the same year. Death penalty Since 2015, Texas has been the state most likely to perform the most executions in the United States. However, the U.S. government and military also enforce death penalties. Since 1976, 1,392 executions in the country have been conducted through lethal injection. The United States is one of the countries around the world still using capital punishment. It is estimated that China executed a thousand prisoners in 2022, while Iran executed approximately 314 people . Some 55 percent of U.S. citizens stated that they thought capital punishment was morally acceptable . About 35 percent of death penalty supporters reasoned that this form of punishment was “an eye for an eye” due to the crime, while 14 percent of supporters believed that the death penalty could save taxpayers money due to costs associated with prisons. In general, most states require some form of first-degree murder as the crime that is punishable by death. However, 40 percent of denouncers of the death penalty stated that it was wrong to take a life, while 17 percent reasoned that the persons may be wrongly convicted. Support for capital punishment reached a peak in 1991 at 76 percent of the population agreeing.

As of 2023, the U.S. state of Texas had executed 586 death row inmates since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated. Over the same time period, Oklahoma executed 123 people, and the U.S. federal government executed 16 people.

In 2021, a total of ** prisoners were executed in the United States, compared to a total of ** prisoners who were executed the year prior. 1999 saw the most prisoners executed in the United States, with ** executions.

In 2023, ** death row inmates were executed in the United States. During the previous year, there were ** executions in the country. However, this is a significant decrease from 2000, when ** death row inmates were executed.

As of August 2024, a total of 1,413 people had been executed by lethal injection in the United States since 1976, making it the most common method of execution in the country. Over that same time period, a further 163 people were executed via electrocution.

The purpose of this project was to examine possible defendant and victim race effects in capital decisions in the federal system. Per the terms of their grant, the researchers selected cases that were handled under the revised Death Penalty Protocol of 1995 and were processed during Attorney General Janet Reno's term in office. The researchers began the project by examining a sample of Department of Justice Capital Case Unit (CCU) case files. These files contained documents submitted by the United States Attorney's Office (USAO), a copy of the indictment, a copy of the Attorney General's Review Committee on Capital Cases (AGRC's) draft and final memorandum to the Attorney General (AG), and a copy of the AG's decision letter. Next, they created a list of the types of data that would be feasible and desirable to collect and constructed a case abstraction form and coding rules for recording data on victims, defendants, and case characteristics from the CCU's hard-copy case files. The record abstractors did not have access to information about defendant or victim gender or race. Victim and defendant race and gender data were obtained from the CCU's electronic files. Five specially trained coders used the case abstraction forms to record and enter salient information in the CCU hard-copy files into a database. Coders worked on only one case at a time. The resulting database contains 312 cases for which defendant- and victim-race data were available for the 94 federal judicial districts. These cases were received by the CCU between January 1, 1995 and July 31, 2000, and for which the AG at the time had made a decision about whether to seek the death penalty prior to December 31, 2000. The 312 cases includes a total of 652 defendants (see SAMPLING for cases not included). The AG made a seek/not-seek decision for 600 of the defendants, with the difference between the counts stemming mainly from defendants pleading guilty prior to the AG making a charging decision. The database was structured to allow researchers to examine two stages in the federal prosecution process, namely the USAO recommendation to seek or not to seek the death penalty and the final AG charging decision. Finally, dispositions (e.g., sentence imposed) were obtained for all but 12 of the defendants in the database. Variables include data about the defendants and victims such as age, gender, race/ethnicity, employment, education, marital status, and the relationship between the defendant and victim. Data are provided on the defendant's citizenship (United States citizen, not United States citizen), place of birth (United States born, foreign born), offense dates, statute code, counts for the ten most serious offenses committed, defendant histories of alcohol abuse, drug abuse, mental illness, physical or sexual abuse as a child, serious head injury, intelligence (IQ), or other claims made in the case. Information is included for up to 13 USAO assessments and 13 AGRC assessments of statutory and non-statutory aggravating factors and mitigating factors. Victim characteristics included living situation and other reported factors, such as being a good citizen, attending school, past abuse by the defendant, gross size difference between the victim and defendant, if the victim was pregnant, if the victim had a physical handicap, mental or emotional problems or developmental disability, and the victim's present or former status (e.g., police informant, prison inmate, law enforment officer). Data are also provided for up to 13 factors each regarding the place and nature of the killing, defendant motive, coperpetrators, weapons, injuries, witnesses, and forensic and other evidence.

In Texas, three people were executed in 2020, the highest number of any U.S. state. A ranking of the most dangerous cities in the world based on murder rate per capita can be found here.

The statistic represents the most common reasons to support the death penalty in the United States in 2014. In 2014, the biblical phrase "an eye for an eye" is the most popular reason for Americans to support the death penalty. About 35 percent of respondents stated this phrase as the main reason for their support.

This activity will no longer be maintained after June 16, 2025. Current lessons are available in the K-12 Classroom Activities Gallery.

This activity uses Map Viewer. ResourcesMapTeacher guide Student worksheetGet startedOpen the map.Use the teacher guide to explore the map with your class or have students work through it on their own with the worksheet.New to GeoInquiriesTM? See Getting to Know GeoInquiries.Social Studies standardsC3: D2.Civ.8.6-8 – Analyze ideas and principles contained in the founding documents of the United States, and explain how they influence the social and political system. C3:D2.Civ.14.9-12 – Analyze historical, contemporary, and emerging means of changing societies, promoting the common good.C3:D2.Civ.11.9-12 – Evaluate multiple procedures for making governmental decisions at the local, state, national, and international levels in terms of the civic purposes achieved.Learning outcomesStudents will interpret map data as they identify and explain differences in the distribution of the death penalty throughout the United States.Students will analyze the relationship between executions and prisoners on death row.More activitiesAll Government GeoInquiriesAll GeoInquiries

As of November 30, six Black prisoners were executed in the United States, compared to 15 white prisoners who were executed, in 2023. 24 executions were carried out in the United States in 2023 as of November 30.

Background: According to cultivation theory, distorted representations of social reality on television can lead to distorted perceptions of reality among viewers. For example, the death penalty has been abolished in most Western countries a long time ago, but is often portrayed or mentioned in US crime shows, which are very popular outside the United States. Previous research suggests that the amount of television viewing can be associated with erroneous perceptions of the use of the death penalty—even when the death penalty is not used in the respective country. Unfortunately, available evidence on this association is inconclusive.Methods: In a cross-sectional web-based survey, we used quota-based sampling techniques to recruit 1,002 individuals representative of the Austrian population in terms of gender, age, education, and region of residence. We asked about their weekly amount of television viewing and use of US crime dramas and measured their beliefs on the use of the death penalty in Austria.Results: Although television viewing in general was not associated with erroneous perceptions of the death penalty (i.e., no overall across-the-board cultivation effect), data analysis provided supporting evidence for the idea of a genre-specific cultivation effect: The more US crime shows participants watched, the more likely they were to mistakenly believe that the death penalty is used in Austria. This association held true even after controlling for the gender, age, and education of participants.Conclusion: The finding that watching US crime shows, which are based on social reality in the United States, is associated with Austrian viewers' confusion with regards to perceptions of the death penalty is consistent with the genre-specific cultivation hypothesis. Some viewers may be guided more by mediated reality than by actual social reality.

In 2021, around 12.2 percent of prisoners on death row in the United States were between 40 and 44 years of age. Most prisoners on death row, at 17.6 percent, were between the ages of 50 and 54 years old. The death penalty is authorized in 27 states and by the federal government.

This article analyses which factors promote or hinder ratification by nation states of the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the only universal treaty aimed at the abolition of the death penalty. The study finds that a democratic regime, a left-wing oriented government, regional peer influence, and a high level of economic development speed up ratification. A legal system built on common law and, if less robustly, ethnic fractionalisation lower the likelihood of ratification. These results are compared to the determinants of domestic death penalty abolition. Besides similarities, one striking difference is that Eastern European country membership in the Council of Europe has been important for domestic abolition, but has had no influence on ratification of the Second Optional Protocol. Western European countries exerted pressure on Eastern European countries to abolish the death penalty, but did not extend their pressure towards a ratification of the Second Protocol. Also, whereas economic development does not matter for domestic abolition, an internationally binding commitment to abolition becomes more likely the richer the country.

Prisoners on death row in the U.S. tend to be men. Only 2.1 percent of those on death row in the United States were women as of December 2021. In the United States, the death penalty is authorized by 27 states and the federal government.

The term "lynching" is believed to derive from the name of Charles Lynch, a Virginia planter who presided over an irregular and unofficial court during the Revolutionary War. Lynch's use of extralegal measures to punish those loyal to the British crown, helped to inspire mobs in later years to administer their own form of vigilante justice outside of the courts. Eventually, the term came to describe cases where supposed offenders were executed through mob violence without a proper trial and outside of legal jurisdiction. The most famous examples of these executions in the U.S. were those where the victim was hanged (due to the relatively large amount of photographic evidence); however, there were also cases where the victims were shot, burned or tortured and dismembered, among others. Lynching before Jim Crow In the early years of U.S. independence, lynching was most common along the frontier and in western territories, due to the lack of established or immediate judicial systems, and most studies suggest that these victims were mostly white and Mexican. Possibly the largest case of lynching (and largest case of mass hanging) in the United States, was in Texas in 1862, in what is known as the "Great Hanging at Gainsville"; this was where local slaveholders organized the mob hanging of 41 white men and shot three others, due to their supposed allegiance to the Union. Following the American Civil War, however, lynching became inextricably linked with racial inequality and white supremacy in the southern states of the U.S., and black Americans comprised the vast majority of lynching victims from 1886 onwards. Lynching of black Americans The Compromise of 1877 coincided with the emergence of the Jim Crow era in the southern states; it saw the removal of Union troops from the south and established political structures based on white supremacy and the oppression of minorities. Gradually, many of the rights and protections that were granted to black Americans following emancipation were stripped away. This period also saw a vast increase in the number of lynchings in the country, with the majority of these cases taking place in the south. Within ten years of Reconstruction's end, the number of black lynchings exceeded those of white lynchings, and over the next century it is estimated that there were over 4,700 lynchings across the country. Of the 4,740 lynchings estimated to have taken place between 1882 and 1965, 3,445 of the victims were black; this equates to over 72 percent of the total victims of lynching, despite black Americans making up just 10 to 13 percent of the total population. Of these 4,700 lynchings, around 3,500 took place in former Confederate states, where the share of black victims increased to 86 percent. As the years progressed, organized lynchings became more infrequent and were publicized less, and the implementation of the death penalty is thought to have replaced the sense of justice that lynching brought to its perpetrators. Nonetheless, it was not until 1952 where the U.S. went a full year without any known cases of lynching, and the final lynching cases were recorded in 1964 (although some have classified a number of murders after 1964 as lynchings, due to their connections with race and civil rights).

As of January 2024, about *** inmates on death row in the United States were white. A further *** death row inmates in that same year were Black, and ** people on death row in the country were Native Americans.

In 2023, **** judicial executions were carried out in Singapore, all of which were for drug trafficking. This was lower than the peak in 2022. Singapore's capital punishment laws were put in the international spotlight again in that year, as the city-state conducted a record number of executions once the COVID-19 restrictions were eased and lifted.

In 2024, 55 percent of survey respondents from the United States stated that they think the death penalty as punishment for a crime is morally acceptable. This is compared to 39 percent of respondents who considered it morally wrong.

The share of Americans in favor of the death penalty for someone convicted of murder has declined since 1991. In 2023, around 53 percent of surveyed respondents supported the death penalty for someone convicted of murder. In 1991, more than three-quarters of Americans, 76 percent, favored the death penalty.