Christy Bieber has a JD from UCLA School of Law and began her career as a college instructor and textbook author. She has been writing full time for over a decade with a focus on making financial and legal topics understandable and fun. Her work has.
Christy Bieber, J.D. ContributorChristy Bieber has a JD from UCLA School of Law and began her career as a college instructor and textbook author. She has been writing full time for over a decade with a focus on making financial and legal topics understandable and fun. Her work has.
Written By Christy Bieber, J.D. ContributorChristy Bieber has a JD from UCLA School of Law and began her career as a college instructor and textbook author. She has been writing full time for over a decade with a focus on making financial and legal topics understandable and fun. Her work has.
Christy Bieber, J.D. ContributorChristy Bieber has a JD from UCLA School of Law and began her career as a college instructor and textbook author. She has been writing full time for over a decade with a focus on making financial and legal topics understandable and fun. Her work has.
Contributor Jeffrey Johnson, J.D. Deputy Legal EditorJeffrey Johnson has written novels and movies in addition to legal analyses of eminent domain and immigration law. His experience in writing engaging fiction makes him uniquely capable of making the most dry and academic legal topics interesting (or.
Jeffrey Johnson, J.D. Deputy Legal EditorJeffrey Johnson has written novels and movies in addition to legal analyses of eminent domain and immigration law. His experience in writing engaging fiction makes him uniquely capable of making the most dry and academic legal topics interesting (or.
Jeffrey Johnson, J.D. Deputy Legal EditorJeffrey Johnson has written novels and movies in addition to legal analyses of eminent domain and immigration law. His experience in writing engaging fiction makes him uniquely capable of making the most dry and academic legal topics interesting (or.
Jeffrey Johnson, J.D. Deputy Legal EditorJeffrey Johnson has written novels and movies in addition to legal analyses of eminent domain and immigration law. His experience in writing engaging fiction makes him uniquely capable of making the most dry and academic legal topics interesting (or.
| Deputy Legal Editor
Updated: Jun 17, 2024, 12:34pm
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The death penalty is the most serious penalty reserved for the most serious crimes. The death penalty can be imposed only for capital offenses, including murder, treason, genocide or kidnapping of the president, a member of Congress or a Supreme Court justice.
The federal government can seek the death penalty when an appropriate federal crime has been committed, and state governments can as well. However, not every state allows the death penalty as a punishment. Some abolished it, and in others, it is still officially allowed, but the governor has placed a hold on executions.
This guide explains death penalty laws by state so you can better understand when and where this sentence is a possibility throughout the United States.
Here are the states in the U.S. that are currently applying the death penalty.
North Carolina Mississippi South Carolina South Dakota, See More See LessCriminal Compliance & Investigations
Prosecution & Dispute Resolution
From Participating PartnersThere 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:
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.
North Dakota Massachusetts Rhode Island Connecticut New Hampshire Washington New Jersey West Virginia New Mexico See More See LessExecutions 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.
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.
