In the United States, capital punishment (also known as the death penalty) is a legal penalty in 27 states (of which two, Oregon and Wyoming, have no inmates sentenced to death), throughout the country at the federal level, and in American Samoa. It is also a legal penalty for some military offenses. Capital punishment has been abolished in the other 23 states and in the federal capital, Washington, D.C. It is constitutionally permitted only for murder, with permissibility for use for crimes against the state not having been legally decided. Although it is a legal penalty in 27 states, only 21 of them have authority to execute death sentences, with the other 6 subject to moratoriums.
As of 2025, four of the 38 OECD member states (the United States, Israel, Japan, and South Korea) retain capital punishment. However, South Korea has observed an unofficial moratorium on executions since 1997.
There were no executions in the United States between 1967 and 1977. In 1972, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down capital punishment statutes in Furman v. Georgia, reducing all pending death sentences to life imprisonment. Subsequently, a majority of states enacted new death penalty statutes, and the court affirmed the legality of the practice in the 1976 case Gregg v. Georgia. Since then, more than 8,500 defendants have been sentenced to death; of these, more than 1,605 have been executed. Most executions are carried out by states. For every 8.2 people executed, one person on death row has been exonerated, in the modern era. At least 200 people who were sentenced to death since 1973 have been exonerated, or about 2.2% of those sentenced.
In 2019, the Trump administration's Department of Justice announced its plans to resume executions for federal crimes. On July 14, 2020, Daniel Lewis Lee became the first inmate executed by the federal government since 2003. Thirteen federal death row inmates were executed, all under Trump. The last and most recent federal execution was of Dustin Higgs, who was executed on January 16, 2021. On July 1, 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland imposed a moratorium on federal executions. In April 2022, 2,414 people were on federal or state death row.
On December 23, 2024, President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal civilian death row to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole; 3 people remain on federal death row. Pursuant to Executive Order 14164, signed by Donald Trump on January 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memorandum on February 5, 2025 that rescinded the Garland moratorium on federal executions. The memorandum also directed the Justice Department to strengthen the death penalty and seek its application by prosecutors whenever reasonable.
The last public execution in the U.S. took place in Kentucky on August 14, 1936, before a crowd of 20,000 people. This was followed by a period from 1936 to 1937 during which executions were semi-public, after which most states began requiring executions to be held privately. Laws generally prohibit public attendance, though journalists and selected individuals may witness them. Timothy McVeigh's 2001 execution was viewed by over 200 people, mainly victims' families, via closed-circuit TV.
Capital punishment in the United States can be traced to early colonial Virginia. The first recorded death sentence in the British North American colonies was carried out in 1608 on Captain George Kendall, who was executed by firing squad at the Jamestown colony for spying on behalf of the Spanish government. Executions in colonial America were also carried out by hanging. The hangman's noose was one of the various punishments the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony applied to enforce religious and intellectual conformity on the whole community.
Constitutional law developments
Executions for various crimes, especially murder and rape, occurred from the creation of the United States up to the early 1960s. Until then, "save for a few mavericks, no one gave any credence to the possibility of ending the death penalty by judicial interpretation of constitutional law", according to abolitionist Hugo Bedau.
The Bill of Rights adopted in 1789 included the Eighth Amendment which prohibited cruel and unusual punishment. The Fifth Amendment was drafted with language implying a possible use of the death penalty, requiring a grand jury indictment for "capital crime" and a due process of law for deprivation of "life" by the government. The Fourteenth Amendment adopted in 1868 also requires a due process of law for deprivation of life by any states. The federal death penalty was restricted to a small category of crimes. Death penalty was carried out according to local customs. The Supreme Court has never ruled the death penalty to be per se unconstitutional.
The possibility of challenging the constitutionality of the death penalty became progressively more realistic after the Supreme Court of the United States decided Trop v. Dulles in 1958. The Supreme Court declared explicitly, for the first time, that the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishment clause must draw its meaning from the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society,” rather than from its original meaning. This approach built on the Court's earlier statement in Weems v. United States (1910) that the meaning of the Eighth Amendment was “not fastened to the obsolete” but could acquire new meaning “as public opinion becomes enlightened by a humane justice.”
Three states abolished the death penalty for murder during the 19th century: Michigan (which only executed 1 prisoner and is the first government in the English-speaking world to abolish capital punishment) in 1847, Wisconsin in 1853, and Maine in 1887. Rhode Island is also a state with a long abolitionist background, having repealed the death penalty in 1852, though it was available for murder committed by a prisoner between 1872 and 1984.
Other states which abolished the death penalty for murder before Furman v. Georgia (1972) include Minnesota in 1911, Vermont in 1964, Iowa and West Virginia in 1965. Hawaii abolished the death penalty in 1948 and Alaska in 1957, both before their statehood. Arizona and Oregon abolished the death penalty by popular vote in 1916 and 1964 respectively, but both reinstated it, again by popular vote, some years later.
In the 1932 case Powell v. Alabama, the court made the first step of what would later be called "death is different" jurisprudence, when it held that any indigent defendant was entitled to a court-appointed attorney in capital cases – a right that was only later extended to non-capital defendants in 1963, with Gideon v. Wainwright.
Capital punishment suspended (1972)
In Furman v. Georgia (1972), the U.S. Supreme Court considered a group of consolidated cases. The lead case involved an individual convicted under Georgia's death penalty statute, which featured a "unitary trial" procedure in which the jury was asked to return a verdict of guilt or innocence and, simultaneously, determine whether the defendant would be punished by death or life imprisonment. The last pre-Furman execution was that of Luis Monge on June 2, 1967.
In a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court struck down th impositions of the death penalty in each of the consolidated cases as unconstitutional in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. The five justices in the majority did not produce a common opinion or rationale for their decision, however, and agreed only on a short statement announcing the result. The narrowest opinions, those of Byron White and Potter Stewart, expressed generalized concerns about the inconsistent application of the death penalty across a variety of cases, but did not exclude the possibility of a constitutional death penalty law. Three justices raised concerns about racial bias. Thurgood Marshall and William J. Brennan Jr. expressed the opinion that the death penalty was proscribed absolutely by the Eighth Amendment as cruel and unusual punishment.