Amnesty International Report: U.S. Falls to 7^th in Executions Amidst 37% Global Decline

Executions world­wide fell by 37% in 2016, accord­ing to the annu­al Amnesty International Global Report on Death Sentences and Executions, released on April 11, 2017. 

With 20 exe­cu­tions in 2016, the United States ranked sev­enth in the world among con­firmed exe­cu­tions, the low­est it has ranked since at least 2005. For the 8^th con­sec­u­tive year, the U.S. was the only coun­try in the Americas to con­duct any exe­cu­tions, and the only Western democ­ra­cy in the world to do so. 

Amnesty International con­firmed that at least 1,032 peo­ple were exe­cut­ed world­wide in 2016, not includ­ing the esti­mat­ed thou­sands exe­cut­ed in China, which clas­si­fies infor­ma­tion on the death penal­ty as a state secret. Vietnamese media uncov­ered secret exe­cu­tions in that coun­try, reveal­ing that Vietnam had car­ried out 429 exe­cu­tions since August 2013, mak­ing it the world’s third biggest exe­cu­tion­er in that peri­od, fol­low­ing China and Iran.

The report found that 23 coun­tries car­ried out exe­cu­tions in 2016, with 87% of the known exe­cu­tions occur­ring in just four coun­tries (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Pakistan). Iran’s 567 exe­cu­tions account­ed for 55% of all doc­u­ment­ed executions worldwide. 

Death sen­tenc­ing trends were mixed world­wide, with improved data col­lec­tion doc­u­ment­ing 3,117 death sen­tences in 2016 — a record num­ber for a sin­gle year — but those death sen­tences were con­cen­trat­ed in a small­er num­ber of coun­tries (55).

Benin and Nauru abol­ished the death penal­ty for all crimes — bring­ing to 104 the num­ber of coun­tries to have done so — and Guinea abol­ished it for ordi­nary crimes. 141 coun­tries world­wide, more than two-thirds, have now either abol­ished the death penal­ty in law or not exe­cut­ed any­one in more than a decade. 

Salil Shetty, sec­re­tary-gen­er­al of Amnesty International, sum­ma­rized the inter­na­tion­al trends in the death penal­ty, say­ing, ​“Just a hand­ful of coun­tries are still exe­cut­ing peo­ple on a large scale. The major­i­ty of states no longer con­done the state tak­ing human life. With just four coun­tries respon­si­ble for 87 per­cent of all record­ed exe­cu­tions — the death penal­ty is itself liv­ing on bor­rowed time.” (Click here to enlarge graphic.)

Despite pur­port­ed moves toward trans­paren­cy, includ­ing a new online court data­base, China con­tin­ued to tight­ly restrict infor­ma­tion on exe­cu­tions. Of the 931 Chinese exe­cu­tions for which Amnesty International found news reports from 2014 – 2016, just 85 were includ­ed in the new database.