As the United States pre­pares to observe Veterans Day 2025, the Death Penalty Information Center today released a new com­pre­hen­sive report: Forgotten Service, Lasting Wounds: Military Veterans and the Death Penalty. The report reveals that approx­i­mate­ly 200 mil­i­tary vet­er­ans await exe­cu­tion on death rows across the U.S., and one in sev­en exe­cu­tions since 1972 has been a mil­i­tary vet­er­an. Many of the juries that sen­tenced these men and women to death nev­er heard about their mil­i­tary ser­vice, their phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal wounds, or their strug­gles after return­ing home from combat. 

Forgotten Service, Lasting Wounds con­firms the many fail­ures that have led to an over­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of mil­i­tary vet­er­ans on death rows and the trou­bling mis­char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of many vet­er­ans as the ​“worst of the worst.” Though the U.S. Supreme Court has rec­og­nized the impor­tance of mil­i­tary ser­vice as mit­i­ga­tion in cap­i­tal cas­es, the legal sys­tem has not always ensured its use in practice.

DPI has assem­bled a com­pre­hen­sive data­base of death-sen­tenced mil­i­tary vet­er­ans. 42 states, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, and the mil­i­tary have sen­tenced more than 800 vet­er­ans to death since 1972. Veterans from every major con­flict since World War II, who served in every branch of the armed forces, and held every rank from pri­vate to colonel, have been sen­tenced to death. 

The report explains what experts have called the ​“bat­tle­field-to-prison” pipeline for a sub­stan­tial num­ber of vet­er­ans. Research from the Council on Criminal Justice con­firms that ser­vice-con­nect­ed con­di­tions sub­stan­tial­ly increase the like­li­hood of crim­i­nal jus­tice involve­ment among military veterans. 

DPI’s Forgotten Service, Lasting Wounds coin­cides with grow­ing objec­tions from vet­er­ans’ advo­cates groups regard­ing exe­cu­tion prac­tices in Florida, where five for­mer ser­vice mem­bers have already been exe­cut­ed in 2025 and two more are sched­uled for exe­cu­tion in 2025. Having sen­tenced at least 117 vet­er­ans to death in the mod­ern death penal­ty era, Florida is respon­si­ble for the sin­gle high­est num­ber of death-sen­tenced vet­er­ans in any state — account­ing for rough­ly 15% of all vet­er­ans nation­wide who have received death sen­tences. Florida is sched­uled to exe­cute Bryan Jennings, who served in the Marines, just 48 hours after Veterans Day. Another exe­cu­tion, of Army vet­er­an Richard Randolph, is sched­uled for the following week.

Data com­piled for the report indi­cates 2025 is among the most lethal years for con­demned vet­er­ans. With sev­en exe­cu­tions of vet­er­ans already car­ried out, and three more sched­uled nation­wide, for­mer ser­vice mem­bers account for more than one-fifth of all exe­cu­tions car­ried out or sched­uled this year. The num­bers reveal that mil­i­tary vet­er­ans com­prise rough­ly 10% of the cur­rent death row pop­u­la­tion, despite mak­ing up just 6% of American adults. Among death-sen­tenced vet­er­ans who saw com­bat, two-thirds served dur­ing the Vietnam War. One third of these death-sen­tenced Vietnam vet­er­ans have already been exe­cut­ed — 20 oth­ers remain on death row. 

In a forth­com­ing episode of DPI’s pod­cast, 12:01 The Death Penalty in Context, Art Cody, Ret. U.S. Navy Captain, and Director of the Center for Veteran Criminal Advocacy, said that Forgotten Service, Lasting Wounds doesn’t just spot­light the crit­i­cal gap in the defense of vet­er­ans in cap­i­tal cas­es, but rather, ​“it’s a flood­light because it real­ly shows how huge the prob­lem is” and ​“how much the mil­i­tary expe­ri­ence affects the indi­vid­ual vet­er­ans.” Capt. Cody empha­sized that mil­i­tary ser­vice indeli­bly changes a per­son, not­ing that when in front of juries, he dri­ves home ​“that because of what this vet­er­an went through; that is why this vet­er­an is in this sit­u­a­tion. They don’t come back the same.” 

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