Death Row USA Fall 2021 Report: Death-Row Population Continues Long-Term Decline

The num­ber of peo­ple sen­tenced to death or fac­ing con­tin­u­ing jeop­ardy of exe­cu­tion in pend­ing cap­i­tal retri­al or resen­tenc­ing pro­ceed­ings con­tin­ued its more than two-decade decline in the third quar­ter of 2021, accord­ing to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) Fall 2021 quar­ter­ly cen­sus of death rows across the United States.

In its Fall 2021 edi­tion of Death Row USA (DRUSA), released February 7, 2022, LDF report­ed that the num­ber of peo­ple on state, fed­er­al, or mil­i­tary death rows or fac­ing pos­si­ble cap­i­tal resen­tenc­ing across the United States had fall­en to 2,455 as of October 1, 2021, down by 98 from LDF’s Fall 2020 report. It is the low­est total since January 1991 when 2,412 peo­ple were on U.S. death rows or faced jeop­ardy of being resen­tenced to death. Death row, which peaked at 3,717 in the July 2001 DRUSA report, has declined by 34.0% since then. 

LDF found that the cap­i­tal con­vic­tions or death sen­tences of 219 peo­ple list­ed in its report have been reversed, leav­ing rough­ly one in eleven cas­es await­ing retri­al or resen­tenc­ing or with grants of relief still sub­ject to pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al appeal. Excluding those indi­vid­u­als, the num­ber peo­ple in the United States fac­ing active death sen­tences fell to 2,236 from its from total of 2,326 in October 2020.

LDF report­ed that 849 peo­ple, or 34.6% of those on death row or fac­ing cap­i­tal resen­tenc­ing as of October 1, 2021 were in states with mora­to­ria on exe­cu­tions. Including those in oth­er states whose death sen­tences have been reversed, LDF cal­cu­lat­ed that there were 1,034 cur­rent­ly unen­force­able death sen­tences, com­pris­ing 41.4% of all active cas­es in which a death sen­tence has been imposed. That left 1,438 death-row pris­on­ers with cur­rent­ly enforce­able death sentences.

California’s death row declined to 695 pris­on­ers but remained more than dou­ble the size of death row in any oth­er state. It was fol­lowed by Florida (333), Texas (198), and Alabama (170). Nationwide, 42.4% of death-row pris­on­ers were white, 41.2% were Black, 13.6% Latinx, 1.9% Asian, and 1.0% were Native American. Among states with at least 10 pris­on­ers on death row, Texas (72.2%), Louisiana (72.3%), California (67.2%), Nebraska (66.7%), and Pennsylvania (61.5%) were the states with the high­est per­cent­age of indi­vid­u­als of col­or on death row. Two per­cent of all death-row pris­on­ers are women.