Death Penalty Laws By State 2024 Guide

Here are the states in the U.S. that are currently applying the death penalty.

Alabama	Kentucky	North Carolina
Arkansas	Louisiana	Oklahoma
Florida	Mississippi	South Carolina
Georgia	Missouri	South Dakota,
Idaho	Montana	Texas
Indiana	Nebraska	Utah
Kansas	Nevada	Wyoming

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There are another six states where the death penalty is legal, but no executions are taking place because the governor has prohibited them by executive order or the attorney general has temporarily halted them. These states include:

• Arizona
• California
• Ohio
• Oregon
• Pennsylvania
• Tennessee

Not all of these executive orders or halts were issued because of a philosophical or moral objection to capital punishment. In some states, logistical problems, such as issues with the process used to execute prisoners, justified the moratorium.

The federal government has also declared a hold on executions for federal crimes.

A total of 23 states and Washington, D.C., have abolished the death penalty, and executions will no longer take place there. These are the 23 states.

Alaska	Maryland	North Dakota
Colorado	Massachusetts	Rhode Island
Connecticut	Michigan	Vermont
Delaware	Minnesota	Virginia
Hawaii	New Hampshire	Washington
Illinois	New Jersey	West Virginia
Iowa	New Mexico	Wisconsin
Maine	New York	–

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Executions occurred in just five states in 2023: Alabama, Florida, Texas, Missouri and Oklahoma. Defendants were sentenced to die in just seven states. A total of only 24 people were executed for their crimes over the year, making 2023 the ninth year when fewer than 30 people were put to death.

The year was also notable because it was the first time that the number of executions that took place exceeded the number of new death sentences imposed.

Executions have become less common as perspectives on the death penalty have shifted. Last year marked the first time that half of Americans indicated they believe the death penalty is generally administered unfairly. This is even though 53% of Americans continue to support the death penalty for murder, a number that has stayed largely consistent since 2017.

A growing number of states have been responding to these rising concerns, with the governors of four states acting in 2022 and 2023 alone to put a hold on executions. Those states are Arizona (2023), Pennsylvania (2023), Oregon (2022) and Tennessee (2022).

On July 1, 2021, the U.S. Attorney General also paused federal executions while investigations continued into the practice.

At the same time, some states have been moving to make their laws stricter and impose the death penalty more frequently, with both Tennessee and Florida passing laws in recent years authorizing the death penalty as a potential sentence for additional crimes, including certain sexual offenses against children. Tennessee took this action despite the moratorium on executions that was put in place in 2022 because of problems with the potential contamination of drugs used in executions.

With support for the death penalty largely divided along party lines and Republicans significantly more likely to favor the death penalty and believe it is fairly applied, the political makeup of a state may play a large role in determining if executions will occur there.

The death penalty is also called capital punishment. In jurisdictions that allow it, a defendant convicted of certain serious crimes can be sentenced to death as punishment for their offenses.

The state or federal government will carry out an execution when someone has been sentenced to death. A variety of methods have historically been used, including hanging, firing squad, lethal gas and electrocution.

However, lethal injection has become the preferred method of carrying out executions in the modern era.

The death penalty has been imposed as a penalty for most of human history, with the first established laws dating back to the Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon in the 18th century BCE.

In the United States, the origin of the death penalty can be traced to British colonists who came to the New World from a society where the death penalty had a long history. The first recorded execution in the new colonies took place in 1608 when Captain George Kendall was sentenced to death for being a spy.

While laws varied among the original U.S. colonies, the death penalty was commonly applied for even minor offenses in Colonial America, including for crimes such as striking a parent or stealing grapes. However, there were objectors even during these times, and American intellectuals began to persuade politicians to impose limits. As early as 1794, Pennsylvania outlawed the death penalty except for those convicted of first-degree murder.

Throughout much of the 19th century, states began to limit the number of capital offenses that defendants could be sentenced to death for committing. Many also abolished mandatory death sentencing and made executions private events in correctional facilities, away from the public eye.

However, the tide began to turn in the early part of the 1900s as first the electric chairs and then cyanide gas came into favor, and criminologists argued that the death penalty was a necessary crime-fighting measure. The 1930s saw more executions than any other decade, averaging 167 deaths annually during that period.

The Supreme Court and the Death Penalty

By the 1950s, however, other countries began abolishing their death penalties, and legal challenges arose in the U.S. in the 1960s, culminating in a 1972 case, Furman v. Georgia. In that case, the Supreme Court held that Georgia’s laws, which gave total sentencing discretion to the jury without any guidance about how to use that discretion, resulted in arbitrary sentencing that violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

A total of 40 death penalty statutes were voided by the court’s decision, but 34 states rewrote their laws. In 1976, the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty as constitutional and allowed “guided discretion” statutes in three separate cases collectively referred to as the Gregg decision. The guided discretion statutes detail how aggravating and mitigating factors can be used to determine if a defendant should be sentenced to death.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the court went on to further limit circumstances when the death penalty was allowed, prohibiting it as a punishment for the rape of an adult woman who wasn’t killed (Coker v. Georgia) and prohibiting the execution of defendants with intellectual disabilities (Atkins v. Virginia).

However, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994, applied the federal death penalty to as many as 60 crimes, including some not involving murder. The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), also signed by President Clinton, impacted states and the federal government and included reforms intended to speed up the time to execution.

In 2001, the first federal execution since 1988 took place, with two more federal executions occurring from 2001 to 2003. States began using new execution drugs in 2011 as problems came to light with the old processes. Many drug companies began objecting to the use of their products in lethal injections, though, and this problem persists to this day.

The use of the death penalty is impacted by many factors, including public perception as well as legal challenges.

Public Opinion

Public opinion on the death penalty in the U.S. is mixed, with Gallup polls showing 53% in favor of capital punishment for those convicted of murder, compared with 44% opposed. However, Republicans are significantly more likely to support the death penalty and believe it is fairly applied, so the death penalty has become a partisan issue.

Political divides help to explain why red states are expanding death penalty offenses and have been moving forward with more completed executions in recent years while many blue states have abolished capital punishment altogether or imposed a moratorium by executive order.

As the Supreme Court and many state courts have begun to take a more favorable view of executions as a method of punishment, states have begun to use alternative methods of executing prisoners and may continue down the path of increasing executions after years of a downward trend.

Legal Challenges

The constitutionality of the death penalty has been repeatedly challenged, with opponents arguing at various times that capital punishment could violate the Fifth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.

In U.S. v. Jackson in 1968, the Supreme Court found unconstitutional a statute that allowed the death penalty to be imposed only if a jury recommended it because the Court found it encouraged defendants hoping to avoid the death penalty to waive the right to a trial by jury.

In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that a jury having total discretion in sentencing defendants to death violated the Eighth Amendment. Forty death penalty statutes were invalidated by this ruling.

States revised their statutes, with some making the death penalty mandatory after conviction for certain crimes. However, the court found mandatory sentencing unconstitutional in Woodson v. North Carolina. The court did allow guided sentencing in a series of three cases referred to collectively as Gregg v. Georgia.

In Gregg, the court also found the death penalty was constitutional under the Eighth Amendment, allowed for a separate penalty phase after guilt was determined and provided for automatic appellate reviews of sentencing. Many states adopted these principles into their death penalty statutes.

Since the Gregg case, the courts have imposed new limits on when the death penalty can be applied, prohibiting the execution of people with intellectual disabilities (Atkins v. Virginia in 2002), as well as prohibiting the execution of those who were minors when they committed a capital offense (Roper v. Simmons in 2005).

However, the court declared executions using lethal injections constitutional in 2006 in Baze v. Rees, which is how most executions today are carried out. In Bucklew v. Precythe in 2019, the court also held that the Eighth Amendment does not guarantee a painless death.

The Supreme Court has also become reluctant to intervene in death penalty cases, with Justice Neil Gorsuch indicating that “last-minute stays should be the extreme exception, not the norm.”

Further legal battles may soon follow, as Florida and Tennessee both passed laws imposing the death penalty for certain sexual offenses against children. This is in contradiction with past Supreme Court precedents barring the death penalty for offenses in which no life was taken.

International Perspectives

As of 2022, 55 countries still have the death penalty, with nine restricting its use to the most serious offenses. Of those 55, 23 had not used the death penalty for at least a decade.

The majority of executions occur in China, which executes thousands, and Iran, where over 500 were executed in 2022. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United States had the third, fourth and fifth most executions, respectively, with the U.S. executing 18 people in 2022.

Many countries have abolished the death penalty altogether, and several international treaties prohibit its use, including Protocol No. 6 to the European Convention on Human Rights, which the Council of Europe requires all new members to ratify.

The United Nations Human Rights Commission also passed a Resolution Supporting Worldwide Moratorium on Executions in 1999 over the objections of the U.S. and nine other countries, calling on countries to restrict the use of the death penalty. The resolution was adopted again in October of 2021.

The United Nations General Assembly has also repeatedly introduced a resolution for an international execution moratorium, with the United States voting no each time.