Bureau of Justice Statistics: Death Row Below 2,500 First Time in 29 Years After 20 Consecutive Years of Decline, Average Time on Death Row Reaches 19.4 Years

The num­ber of peo­ple under sen­tence of death in the United States has fall­en below 2,500 for the first time in 29 years fol­low­ing twen­ty con­sec­u­tive years of decline, accord­ing to the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).

In a new report, Capital Punishment, 2020 – Statistical Tables, released December 10, 2021, BJS says that 2,469 peo­ple were under sen­tence of death in the cus­tody of 28 states and the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment as of December 31, 2020, down 3.7% from the 2,563 BJS now says were on death row at the end of 2019. The total marked the first time few­er than 2,500 peo­ple were under sen­tence of death in the United States since the end of 1991, when BJS report­ed 2,465 peo­ple were impris­oned on the nation’s death rows.

The BJS data indi­cates that the size of U.S. death row peaked at 3,601 in its year-end mea­sure­ments in December 2000 and has fall­en every year since. The 1,132 few­er peo­ple now impris­oned on death row marks a decline of 31.4%.

While the num­ber of peo­ple under sen­tence of death con­tin­ues to drop, the aver­age dura­tion of their death-row impris­on­ment pri­or to exon­er­a­tion, resen­tenc­ing, death, or exe­cu­tion con­tin­ues to rise. BJS reports that the aver­age amount of time a pris­on­er has been incar­cer­at­ed pur­suant to their lat­est death sen­tence is now 19.4 years. That fig­ure is cal­cu­lat­ed from the date of a prisoner’s lat­est death sen­tence and does not take into con­sid­er­a­tion the time near­ly 10% of those on death row had pre­vi­ous­ly been impris­oned pur­suant to uncon­sti­tu­tion­al cap­i­tal con­vic­tions or death sen­tences that had been over­turned in the courts. More than half of the pris­on­ers cur­rent­ly on death row (1,245, or 50.4%) were sen­tenced to death in 2000 or earlier.

For the 17 pris­on­ers exe­cut­ed in 2020, the aver­age time elapsed between the impo­si­tion of their most recent death sen­tence and their exe­cu­tion was 227 months, or 18.9 years. That was the fourth longest aver­age time lapse between sen­tence and exe­cu­tion since exe­cu­tions resumed in the U.S. in 1977. Nonetheless it rep­re­sent­ed a decline of more than three years from the 264-month dura­tion between lat­est sen­tence and exe­cu­tion for the 22 peo­ple exe­cut­ed in 2019. 

The report pro­vid­ed con­tin­u­ing evi­dence of the aging of death row. The aver­age and medi­an age of pris­on­ers on death row at the end of 2020 was 52 years, up from 51 at the end of 2019. Nearly a quar­ter of death-row pris­on­ers (597, 24.2%) were age 60 or old­er, up from 22.4% at the end of 2019. In December 2000, the aver­age and medi­an age of death-row pris­on­ers was 38 years and only 2.7% of death-row pris­on­ers had reached age 60.