Death Sentences in the United States Since 1973

By State and By Year

SOURCES: DPIC’s Death Penalty Census and annu­al death sen­tence track­ing. Each year, DPIC col­lects infor­ma­tion on the num­ber of death sen­tences in the United States. We con­tact state agen­cies, state death penal­ty orga­ni­za­tions, and death penal­ty lit­i­ga­tors, and review news reports to con­firm the num­bers. We only count the num­ber of ​“new sen­tences,” i.e., we do not recount indi­vid­u­als who were sen­tenced to death in a pre­vi­ous year, had their sen­tenced over­turned, and were resen­tenced in the cur­rent year. Sentences are only count­ed when a judge impos­es the sen­tence, even though a jury may have returned a death verdict earlier.

Research for the Death Penalty Census is ongo­ing, and DPIC has iden­ti­fied three death sen­tences for which the year of sen­tenc­ing is uncer­tain. Those three sen­tences are not includ­ed in the table above.

This page pre­vi­ous­ly used data from the Capital Punishment Annual Reports pro­duced by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). BJS counts only the most recent­ly imposed death sen­tence for those indi­vid­u­als who were resen­tenced to death after their pri­or con­vic­tions or death sen­tences were over­turned. BJS makes revi­sions to its nation­al annu­al totals in sub­se­quent reports, but does not pro­vide infor­ma­tion on which states’ totals have changed.

National Death Sentences by Year