DPIC Analysis: Execution Trends Continue to Decline in 2017

The long-term decline in executions in the United States will continue in 2017, according to an analysis of execution data by the Death Penalty Information Center. Although the number of executions in the United States in 2017 will surpass the 20 executions carried out last year—which had been a 25-year low—the data reflects that long-term, mid-term, and short-term execution trends in the United States will continue to decline.

DPIC’s analysis shows that, even if all the executions currently scheduled to take place through the end of 2017 are carried out, the average number of executions in the United States over the past 3, 5, and 10 years will drop by 8.4%, 9.1%, and 3.6%, respectively.

The number of executions in the United States has fallen in 14 of the last 19 years, from a high of 98 in 1999 to last year’s generational low. After reaching a 14-year low in 2008, executions increased by 15 in 2009 before declining or remaining steady the next seven years.

Alabama’s execution of Torrey McNabb on October 19 was the 21st execution in the United States in 2017, with seven more executions scheduled this year. If all are carried out, the number of executions over the last three years will still fall by seven, with an average of 25.3 executions per year; there will be a decrease of 15 executions over the past five years, with the average number of executions over that period falling to 30.4 per year; and there will be a decrease of 14 executions over the past decade, with the average number of executions per year falling to 37.1.

According to an analysis by The Marshall Project, the increase in the number of executions in 2017 “does not suggest that executions are likely to become more common.” Instead, it reports, “executions are likely to keep declining for one big reason: juries are handing out fewer death sentences.”

USA Today reports that the executions today are the remnants of “largely decades-old death sentences being carried out.” Those executions, the paper reports, “have illustrated the problems [death-penalty] opponents highlight in their quest to end capital punishment,” including unredressed claims of innocence and requests for forensic testing, lack of transparency in carrying out executions, and race-of-victim disparities—”nearly all the murder victims [in the execution cases] were white.”

Rob Smith, executive director of the Fair Punishment Project, said that the people being executed today were sentenced years ago “by juries who would never return that death sentence today and prosecutors who would never seek that death sentence today.” He said the historic decline in new death sentences, from more than 300 per year in the mid-1990s to fewer than 50 per year, will result in fewer executions going forward.

Heather Beaudoin, national organizer for death-penalty abolitionist group, Equal Justice USA, said she is “not discourage[d]” by this year’s execution numbers. What “we’re seeing [is] the last grasps of trying to hold on to the death penalty in this country,” she said.

Ben Cohen, a lawyer with the Capital Appeals Project in New Orleans, said today’s executions largely involve cases tried “twenty years ago [during] the height of the death sentencing era.” The “long-term trend,” he told USA Today, “remains clearly aimed at replacing death sentences and executions with life without parole.”