Introduction

In most U.S. states, the death penal­ty is a rel­ic of anoth­er era. If you are age 43 or younger, your gen­er­a­tion increas­ing­ly sup­ports alter­na­tives to the death penal­ty. If you live in one of 34 states, your state either has no death penal­ty, or the last exe­cu­tion was more than ten years ago. Just four states — Alabama, Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma — were respon­si­ble for 76% of exe­cu­tions this year. 

The twen­­ty-six new death sen­tences in 2024 were scat­tered among ten states, but the only states which per­mit non-unan­i­­mous sen­tenc­ing were respon­si­ble for 42% of them: Florida (7) and Alabama (4). Nine of these eleven death sen­tences were non-unanimous.

Nine states exe­cut­ed 25 peo­ple this year, sim­i­lar to 2023 (24 exe­cu­tions). But if you live in one of the oth­er 41 states, the death penal­ty may not even reg­is­ter as a con­cern. This fact did not go unno­ticed by politi­cians run­ning for nation­al office. In this impor­tant pres­i­den­tial elec­tion year, the death penal­ty was notice­ably absent from both major polit­i­cal par­ty plat­forms and wasn’t an issue in the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. Use of the death penal­ty also failed to rank as a pri­or­i­ty issue among like­ly vot­ers in national polls. 

Local politi­cians fre­quent­ly drove out­comes in death penal­ty cas­es this year. Alabama’s elect­ed offi­cials chose to use nitro­gen gas to suf­fo­cate three pris­on­ers despite wide­spread con­dem­na­tion of a method many experts called tor­ture. In Missouri, state and local politi­cians fought about the fate of Marcellus Williams, whose exe­cu­tion occurred despite the oppo­si­tion of more than one mil­lion peo­ple. And in Texas and Oklahoma, there was rare pub­lic sup­port from elect­ed offi­cials who helped focus atten­tion on the fail­ure of state laws and pro­ce­dures to ade­quate­ly pro­tect pris­on­ers with com­pelling evi­dence of inno­cence, like Robert Roberson and Richard Glossip. Looking ahead, the pow­er of local politi­cians is like­ly to be deter­mi­na­tive so long as the United State Supreme Court refus­es to inter­vene in state death penalty cases.