DPI’s “What to Know” series examines capital punishment from multiple angles, one topic at a time. Each installment provides essential facts and data on specific aspects of the death penalty. This installment considers the death penalty through a human-rights lens, looking at the standards and frameworks that may come into play from sentencing through review, death-row confinement, and execution, as well as how those standards intersect with U.S. law and practice. 

Why it matters 

Human-rights law provides a framework for examining how governments exercise power over people facing the death penalty. Its protections can be relevant from charging and trial through confinement, appeals, clemency, and execution. A death sentence may be authorized under domestic law while still raising separate human rights law questions about the right to life, fair process, equality and non-discrimination, access to review, and humane treatment. 
 
Core Statistics 

  • Wrongful convictions remain a documented feature of the modern death penalty. 203 people have been exonerated from death row since 1973, across 30 states, according to DPI. 
  • Long periods under sentence of death in solitary confinement, common in U.S. death penalty cases, violate the Nelson Mandela Rules and have detrimental effects on physical and mental health. In a 2020 DPI analysis, 1,344 people — 51.3% of those then on U.S. death rows or still at risk of capital resentencing — had been incarcerated facing execution for more than 20 years. The same analysis identified 191 people who had been executed after spending at least two decades under a death sentence. The analysis is a 2020 snapshot, not a current death-row count. 
  • Race-of-victim disparities are visible in death sentencing data. Among death sentences imposed from 1972 through 2025, 72% involved at least one white victim. Cases involving a Black defendant and one or more white victims accounted for 23% of death sentences during that period, compared with 2% involving a white defendant and one or more Black victims. 
  • Capital punishment is concentrated in a minority of countries. At the end of 2025, 145 countries had abolished the death penalty in law or practice, including 113 that had abolished it for all crimes. Amnesty International recorded executions in 17 countries during 2025. 

Key Facts 

International law places limits on use of the death penalty — even where it remains legal. 

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) recognizes the inherent right to life and prohibits arbitrary deprivation of life. Article 6 does not categorically prohibit capital punishment in countries that retain it, but it sets limits on when a death sentence may be imposed. It also requires that the punishment be limited to the “most serious crimes” and imposed only after a final judgment by a competent court. Article 6 also protects the right to seek pardon or commutation and prohibits death sentences for crimes committed by people under 18 and the execution of pregnant women. 

The UN Human Rights Committee’s General Comment No. 36 interprets “most serious crimes” narrowly as crimes of extreme gravity involving intentional killing. The Committee has also said that mandatory death sentences are arbitrary because they do not allow a court to consider the circumstances of the offense or the individual before deciding whether death is an appropriate punishment. 

Article 6 also provides that nothing in it may be invoked to delay or prevent the abolition of capital punishment. The Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR, adopted in 1989, goes further by requiring states that join it to abolish the death penalty and refrain from executions within their jurisdiction. 

International standards and U.S. law do not operate in the same way. 

The United States ratified the ICCPR on June 8, 1992; the Covenant entered into force for the United States on September 8, 1992. It ratified both the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the Convention against Torture (CAT) on October 21, 1994. In each instance, however, the U.S. Senate attached reservations, understandings, or declarations that limit how those obligations operate within U.S. law. 

The legal sources mentioned above also play different roles. A treaty may create international obligations for a country that has ratified it. At the same time, treaty-body interpretations, UN safeguards, non-binding standards, and decisions from other legal systems may help interpret, develop, or evaluate those obligations without carrying the same legal force. 

For the ICCPR, the United States declared Articles 1 through 27 “not self-executing” and entered reservations relevant to capital punishment and Article 7. It likewise declared ICERD not self-executing, and declared Articles 1 through 16 of the Convention against Torture not self-executing. This means those treaty provisions generally cannot, by themselves, serve as the basis for an individual claim in U.S. court. It does not erase the United States’ international obligations under the treaties. 

The same underlying facts can therefore be framed differently depending on the legal system examining them. U.S. courts generally analyze capital cases through constitutional protections such as due process, equal protection, the right to counsel, and the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. International bodies may examine related concerns through the right to life, arbitrariness, fair-trial protections, equality, humane treatment, or the right to an effective remedy. Those approaches may overlap, but their legal tests and available remedies are not the same. 

U.S. Supreme Court decisions have also narrowed the categories of people who may be executed. In Atkins v. Virginia (2002), the Court prohibited the execution of people with intellectual disability; in Roper v. Simmons (2005), it barred the death penalty for crimes committed by people under 18. Both decisions looked beyond the facts of the individual case to broader developments in capital punishment and evolving standards of decency. 

The Inter-American system provides another avenue for international review. The United States has not ratified the American Convention on Human Rights. It is nevertheless subject to scrutiny by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which considers petitions involving OAS member states that are not parties to the Convention by reference to the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man. The Commission’s findings and recommendations are international human-rights decisions, not judgments of a U.S. court, and they do not by themselves create a domestic cause of action. 

The legal process that produces a death sentence is part of the analysis. 

Article 14 of the ICCPR separately guarantees a fair hearing before a competent, independent, and impartial tribunal. In a capital case, defects in that process can affect the right-to-life analysis itself. The Human Rights Committee has identified serious fair-trial violations that may make a resulting death sentence arbitrary, including coerced confessions, ineffective legal representation, failure to respect the presumption of innocence, inadequate time or facilities to prepare a defense, and lack of effective appellate review. 

Many of those concerns also appear in U.S. capital cases documented by DPI. Its innocence research includes wrongful convictions involving unreliable evidence, false or coerced statements, inadequate defense, and official misconduct. From a human-rights perspective, the focus is not only on the sentence imposed but on whether the safeguards required before an irreversible punishment were meaningful and effective. 

Review does not end at conviction or sentencing. Article 6 protects the right to seek pardon or commutation, and the UN safeguards for people facing the death penalty provide that an execution should not proceed while an appeal, other recourse procedure, or clemency proceeding remains pending. Foreign nationals may have additional treaty protections relating to notice of their right to communicate with their consulate. 

Equality and non-discrimination are separate protections. 

The ICERD requires states parties to prohibit and eliminate racial discrimination in the enjoyment of protected rights, including equality before courts and other institutions administering justice. 

International treaty bodies have repeatedly examined racial disparities in the U.S. criminal legal system, including capital punishment. In its 2022 concluding observations on the United States, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed concern that racial and ethnic minorities were overrepresented in the criminal justice system and disproportionately subjected to harsher sentences, including the death penalty. The Human Rights Committee raised similar concerns in its 2023 review of the United States, pointing to racial disparities in death sentencing and a disproportionate impact on people of African descent. 

DPI’s race-of-victim data provide a separate U.S.-specific measure of disparity. Statistical disparities do not, by themselves, establish the cause of those differences or prove discriminatory intent in an individual case; they can be examined alongside charging practices, jury selection, sentencing, review, and other parts of the capital process. 
 
 

Human-rights protections continue after sentencing. 

A death sentence does not end a state’s human-rights obligations. Article 7 of the ICCPR prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, protections that extend to both conditions in custody and the execution itself. The Convention against Torture establishes additional obligations concerning torture and other forms of prohibited ill-treatment. 

The Nelson Mandela Rules, although non-binding, set out international standards for the treatment of prisoners. They define solitary confinement as 22 hours or more a day without meaningful human contact and consider confinement lasting more than 15 consecutive days to be “prolonged.” The Rules prohibit indefinite and prolonged solitary confinement and provide that solitary should be used only exceptionally, as a last resort, for the shortest possible period, and subject to independent review. U.S. death row prisoners are routinely held in solitary confinement for years or decades. 

Long periods under a death sentence have raised a separate set of human-rights concerns. International and regional bodies have considered the combined effects of lengthy confinement, restrictive conditions, uncertainty over when an execution may occur, and repeated exposure to the possibility of execution. These concerns are often described as the “death-row phenomenon.” DPI has used this framework to examine cases of death-row confinement in the United States extending over multiple decades. 

The manner of execution is also part of the analysis. 

Human-rights scrutiny extends to the execution itself. The Human Rights Committee has interpreted Article 7 of the ICCPR to prohibit execution methods that amount to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The 1984 UN safeguards similarly state that, where capital punishment is carried out, it should inflict the least possible suffering. 

In its 2023 review of the United States, the Human Rights Committee raised concerns about allegations involving untested lethal drugs, severe pain, and botched executions, and called for execution methods to comply with Article 7. DPI separately tracks lethal-injection protocols and drugs as well as botched executions. 

Secrecy makes those risks harder to evaluate. DPI has documented state laws shielding information about matters such as the source of execution drugs and the identities or qualifications of execution-team members. Secrecy does not itself establish that a protocol violates human-rights standards, but it often restricts the information available to defense counsel, courts, journalists, researchers, and the public, affecting whether and how an execution procedure may be challenged or reviewed. 

Relevant Cases and Current Developments 
Inter-American Commission: Sequoyah v. United States 

The Inter-American Commission’s 2020 merits report in Sequoyah v. United States brought several protections together in one U.S. capital case. Nvwtohiyada Idehesdi Sequoyah was sentenced to death in California in 1992. The case involved his self-representation, the scrutiny applied before he was permitted to represent himself, lengthy appellate delays, and the conditions and duration of death-row confinement. 

The Commission concluded that the courts had not subjected Mr. Sequoyah’s decision to represent himself in a capital case to sufficiently rigorous scrutiny. It also found excessive delay in the appellate process: more than 20 years passed between his death sentence and the filing of his first appellate brief, and he had spent 27 years on death row by the time of the Commission’s review. The Commission held that his prolonged confinement under sentence of death violated his right to humane treatment, recommended that his sentence be commuted, and recommended that the United States adopt a moratorium on executions. It reached its conclusions under the American Declaration and Inter-American human-rights standards rather than U.S. constitutional law. 

In January 2023, the California Supreme Court overturned Mr. Sequoyah’s conviction and death sentence and ordered a new trial, finding that the trial court had failed to address evidence that he was not competent to represent himself. Prosecutors retain the option of seeking the death penalty again on retrial. 

Tennessee: failed execution attempts in 2026 

Tennessee experienced two failed execution attempts in 2026. On May 21, the execution of Tony Carruthers was halted after the execution team established a primary IV line but could not establish the backup intravenous access required by state protocol; Governor Bill Lee subsequently granted a one-year reprieve. On September 30, the state’s attempt to execute Christa Pike also failed. Following the second failed execution attempt, Governor Lee paused executions for the remainder of 2026 and ordered an independent third-party review, the second time he has halted executions to review the state’s execution protocol, following a similar pause in 2022. Ms. Pike’s attorneys have since asked the governor to commute her sentence to life without parole. The failed attempts brought renewed attention to Tennessee’s secretive execution procedures, the medical qualifications of execution personnel, and concerns about pain during lethal injection. 
 
 

Historical Perspective 

The international treatment of capital punishment has shifted substantially since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognized the right to life in 1948. Later treaties placed increasingly specific limits on the death penalty, while other international and regional instruments went further by committing states to abolition. 

Courts outside the United States have also used human-rights and constitutional protections to examine capital punishment. In Soering v. United Kingdom (1989), the European Court of Human Rights held that extraditing Jens Soering to face a capital prosecution in Virginia would expose him to a real risk of treatment contrary to Article 3 of the European Convention. Its analysis focused on the expected period and conditions of death-row confinement together with Mr. Soering’s personal circumstances. 

In S v. Makwanyane (1995), South Africa’s Constitutional Court held the death penalty unconstitutional under South African law. The judgment considered life, dignity, equality, proportionality, arbitrariness, and cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment together. Neither Soering nor Makwanyane govern U.S. courts, but both show how other legal systems have approached capital punishment through broader rights-based frameworks. 

Global Perspective 

The most recent full-year global figures are for 2025. According to Amnesty International’s 2025 death-penalty report, 113 countries had abolished capital punishment for all crimes by the end of the year, while 145 were considered abolitionist in law or practice. Amnesty recorded at least 2,707 executions in 17 countries, compared with 1,518 known executions in 2024. Those figures do not include the thousands of executions Amnesty believes took place in China, where the information is classified, or executions believed to have occurred extensively in North Korea and Viet Nam. 

In 2025, the United States carried out 47 executions and was the only country in the Americas known to have executed people that year. Japan, which resumed executions in June 2025 after a nearly three-year hiatus, carried out another execution on August 21, 2026. 

At the UN level, the latest adopted General Assembly resolution on a moratorium on the use of the death penalty is Resolution 79/179, adopted on December 17, 2024 by a vote of 130 in favor, 32 against, and 22 abstentions. It calls on states to establish a moratorium on executions with a view to abolition. The United States was among the 32 states that voted against it, consistent with its votes on every moratorium resolution since the first in 2007. In explaining its vote at the Third Committee stage, the U.S. Mission to the UN pointed to Article 6 of the ICCPR, which permits capital punishment within established limits, as the basis for its opposition. A General Assembly resolution is not a treaty and, by itself, does not make capital punishment universally unlawful. 

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