DPIC Year End Report 2023: High-Profile Innocence Cases Contribute to Public Perception that the Death Penalty is Unfairly Administered

Against a back­drop of high-pro­file inno­cence cas­es and the U.S. Supreme Court’s seem­ing indif­fer­ence to them, the 2023 Gallup poll found that more Americans now believe that the death penal­ty is admin­is­tered unfair­ly than fair­ly. Use of the death penal­ty remained geo­graph­i­cal­ly iso­lat­ed, with only five states car­ry­ing out exe­cu­tions and only sev­en impos­ing death sen­tences. For the ninth con­sec­u­tive year, few­er than 30 peo­ple were exe­cut­ed and few­er than 50 were sen­tenced to death. These find­ings head­line DPIC’s 2023 Year End Report, released on December 1.

“The data show that most Americans no longer believe the death penal­ty can be imposed fair­ly,” said Robin M. Maher, DPIC’s exec­u­tive direc­tor. ​“That impor­tant change can also be seen in the unprece­dent­ed show of sup­port for death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers from con­ser­v­a­tive law­mak­ers and elect­ed offi­cials this year, some of whom now oppose use of the death penal­ty in their state.” 

The num­ber of exe­cu­tions increased slight­ly from 18 in 2022 to 24 in 2023, a change that can be attrib­uted to Florida’s return to exe­cu­tions the same year its gov­er­nor launched a pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. Florida’s six exe­cu­tions were the state’s high­est num­ber since 2014, and it imposed five new death sen­tences, the high­est num­ber of any state this year. Most of the pris­on­ers who were exe­cut­ed in 2023 would like­ly not have been sen­tenced to death if tried today due to sig­nif­i­cant changes in the law, pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al deci­sion-mak­ing, and pub­lic atti­tudes over the past few decades. Today, they would have pow­er­ful argu­ments for life sen­tences and deci­sions from juries who bet­ter under­stand the effects of men­tal ill­ness, devel­op­men­tal impair­ments, and severe trau­ma. 79% of the peo­ple exe­cut­ed this year had at least one of the fol­low­ing impair­ments: seri­ous men­tal ill­ness; brain injury, devel­op­men­tal brain dam­age, or an IQ in the range con­sid­ered intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled; and/​or chron­ic seri­ous child­hood trau­ma, neglect and/​or abuse. One-third or eight of the peo­ple exe­cut­ed had all three. At least three pris­on­ers were under the age of 20 at the time of their crimes.