Death Sentences Decline by More than Half in Decade of the 2010s

Death sen­tences imposed in the United States fell by more than half over the course of the 2010s, con­tin­u­ing a steep nation­wide decline that has seen death sen­tences fall by more than 89% since the peak death sen­tenc­ing years of the mid 1990s. Fewer death sen­tences were imposed in the sec­ond half of the 2010s than in any oth­er five-year peri­od since cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment resumed in the United States in 1973. [Click here to enlarge image]

A Death Penalty Information Center analy­sis of sen­tenc­ing data found that three‑, five‑, and ten-year death sen­tenc­ing rates all fell com­pared to their cor­re­spond­ing pri­or time peri­ods. The United States imposed an aver­age of 38.7 new death sen­tences between 2017 – 2019, which marked a 24.2% decline from the aver­age of 51.0 per year imposed across the coun­try in the pre­ced­ing three-year peri­od from 2014 – 2016. The five-year annu­al aver­age of 39.2 new death sen­tences imposed between 2015 – 2019 was 55.1% below the aver­age of 87.4 new death sen­tences imposed per year from 2010 – 2014, a decline of more than half. Similarly, the ten-year death-sen­tenc­ing num­bers reflect­ed a decline by more than half, with the annu­al aver­age of 63.3 new death sen­tences imposed per year over the course of the 2010s falling 56.6% below the aver­age of 145.8 new death sen­tences per year in the first decade of the 21^st century.

The actu­al num­ber of death sen­tences imposed stark­ly demon­strat­ed the mag­ni­tude of cap­i­tal punishment’s decline. There were 825 few­er death sen­tences in the decade of the 2010s than in the decade of the 2000s, a drop that was 192 greater than the num­ber of new death sen­tences actu­al­ly imposed. The decline reached his­tor­i­cal lows in the sec­ond half of the decade, when each year pro­duced few­er than fifty new death sen­tences. The only oth­er year in which death sen­tences were that low was in 1973, the year after the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down exist­ing death-penal­ty statutes and before many states had enact­ed new cap­i­tal punishment laws. 

The sec­ond half of the 2010s pro­duced 635 few­er new death sen­tences per year than the years 2000 – 2004, a decline of 76.4%, or 127 death sen­tences per year. The nation imposed 241 few­er new death sen­tences in 2015 – 2019 than in first half of the 2010s, a decline of 48.2 new death sen­tences per year. 

The num­ber of exe­cu­tions also steeply declined, falling 45.1% in the 2010s from the decade of the 2000s. 266 few­er exe­cu­tions were car­ried out in that peri­od. The 118 exe­cu­tions car­ried out in 2014 – 2019 were down by 42.7% from the first half of the decade, with 88 few­er exe­cu­tions car­ried out in the last five years. Executions were down by near­ly two-thirds (65.9%) from the first five years of this cen­tu­ry, when 346 pris­on­ers were put to death — an aver­age of 69.2 exe­cu­tions per year. There were an aver­age of 23.6 exe­cu­tions per year in the United States between 2015 – 2019.