The lat­est edi­tion of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Death Row USA shows an 8% decline in the coun­try’s death row pop­u­la­tion dur­ing the past 5 years, down from 3,652 in 2000 to 3,373 at the end of 2005. According to the report, California con­tin­ues to have the nation’s largest death row pop­u­la­tion (649), fol­lowed by Texas (409), Florida (388), Pennsylvania (231), and Ohio (196).


Nationally, the racial com­po­si­tion of those on death row is 45% white, 42% black, and 10% latino/​latina. Of states with more than 10 peo­ple on death row, Texas (70%) and Pennsylvania (69%) con­tin­ue to have the largest per­cent­age of minorites on death row. Eighty per­cent of the vic­tims in the crimes that result­ed in exe­cu­tions were white. 


Death Row USA is released quar­ter­ly by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The report con­tains the lat­est death row pop­u­la­tion fig­ures, exe­cu­tion sta­tis­tics, and an overview of the most recent legal devel­op­ments relat­ed to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. These death row sta­tis­tics may dif­fer slight­ly from those com­piled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics because of a dif­fer­ence in methodologies.


See Death Row USA, January 1, 2006. See also DPIC’s Death Row.

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