The death penalty in the United States

Since the peak · 2000–2023

The population under sentence of death has fallen in every year since 2000. Executions fell first: the most in any year since 1977 was in the 1990s, and 2023 saw 24.

By jurisdiction · executions since 1977

The two columns come from two lists the Bureau prints side by side, each sorted by its own value. A jurisdiction appears here if it has done either — executed somebody since 1977, or held somebody at the end of 2023 — so a blank is an absence rather than a zero.

For every person executed in 2023, 2.7 left death row another way · 2022–2023

These five columns reconcile exactly: the population on December 31 2022, plus prisoners received, minus prisoners removed other than by execution, minus prisoners executed, is the population a year later — for every jurisdiction and separately within every category below. Nothing else in this publication reconciles to the person, and it is asserted rather than described.

27.3% of the people who left death row in 2023 were executed. The Bureau publishes the causes, so this is a share of a published total rather than the floor the sentence at the top of this page has to settle for.

Where they went, 2023

The arithmetic behind it, by race or ethnicity

The people on death row have been there 21.7 years on average · December 31, 2023

48.8% of them — 1,070 people — were sentenced before the century turned, and 16 were sentenced before 1981, more than forty years earlier. Kentucky's prisoners have waited longest: a mean of 27.9 years, and not one of them was sentenced since 2016.

From sentence to execution

Executions by race or ethnicity

1,582 executions since 1977, by the category the Bureau records against each. Race excludes people of Hispanic origin unless named — the publisher’s own convention, and the reason a white prisoner count here and in appendix table 3 are different numbers about different groups. No share is shown against a population: this counts executions, and the denominator a reader would want is not in this table.

By jurisdiction

A blank mean is the Bureau declining to calculate one from fewer than ten cases. It is not a short wait, and those jurisdictions are left out of the ranking above rather than sorted to the bottom of it.

Death row is 40.5% black and 42.7% white · 2023

52 of the 2,192 people under sentence of death are in neither of the three categories the Bureau gives a column to — American Indian or Alaska Native prisoners, and Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander prisoners, who are inside the total and have no line of their own. So the three shares do not reach a hundred, and the shortfall is a category rather than a rounding.

This share and the country’s black population share count different people. The Census Bureau asks race and Hispanic origin as two separate questions, so its black population includes people the Bureau of Justice Statistics counts here as Hispanic and not as black. Dividing one into the other does not give a rate that is too rough — it gives a number about no group of people. The figure a reader wants is death row per 100,000 black, not Hispanic, adults, and that denominator is not in what this site holds.

Two counts of white prisoners in 2023: 1,243 and 935

Both are the Bureau’s and both are right. From the 2023 edition the by-jurisdiction table excludes prisoners of Hispanic origin from its white and black counts; the series below, which reaches back to 1968, does not, and says so in its own note. They are different measures of the same people, so they are never plotted together and never subtracted from each other.

How · 1977–2023

Nationally, because the small numbers do not survive being divided fifty ways: three people have been executed by firing squad and three by hanging in the whole period.

Elsewhere in this hub

• Homicide victims and circumstances
• People in prison
• People in local jails
• Probation and parole
• Arrests by race
• Hate crime
• Police employment
• Officers killed and assaulted
• Homicide over time
• Crime and justice