Nigh U.Due south. adults support the death penalization for people convicted of murder, according to an April 2021 Pew Research Center survey. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, majorities believe the death punishment is non applied in a racially neutral way, does not deter people from committing serious crimes and does not have enough safeguards to forestall an innocent person from being executed.

Use of the decease penalty has gradually declined in the United States in contempo decades. A growing number of states take abolished it, and expiry sentences and executions have become less common. But the story is not one of continuous turn down across all levels of government. While state-level executions accept decreased, the federal government put more prisoners to death under President Donald Trump than at whatsoever point since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated death sentence in 1976.

As debates over the death penalty continue in the U.S., here'due south a closer wait at public opinion on the issue, likewise as primal facts almost the nation'southward use of upper-case letter penalization.

This Pew Research Eye analysis examines public opinion about the death sentence in the United States and explores how the nation has used capital punishment in recent decades.

The public opinion findings cited here are based primarily on a Pew Research Center survey of 5,109 U.S. adults, conducted from April 5 to 11, 2021. Everyone who took part in the survey is a member of the Eye's American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey console that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This manner nearly all U.Due south. adults have a chance of choice. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan amalgamation, teaching and other categories. Read more about the ATP's methodology. Here are the questions used from this survey, along with responses, and its methodology.

Findings near the assistants of the death penalty – including the number of states with and without capital punishment, the annual number of expiry sentences and executions, the demographics of those on decease row and the average amount of fourth dimension spent on death row – come up from the Decease Penalisation Information Center and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Six-in-ten U.S. adults strongly or somewhat favor the decease penalization for bedevilled murderers, according to the April 2021 survey. A similar share (64%) say the expiry punishment is morally justified when someone commits a crime like murder.

A bar chart showing that the majority of Americans favor the death penalty, but nearly eight-in-ten see 'some risk' of executing the innocent

Back up for upper-case letter punishment is strongly associated with the view that information technology is morally justified in sure cases. Nine-in-x of those who favor the decease penalization say it is morally justified when someone commits a criminal offence similar murder; simply a quarter of those who oppose capital letter punishment encounter it every bit morally justified.

A majority of Americans have concerns about the fairness of the death sentence and whether information technology serves equally a deterrent against serious crime. More than one-half of U.Due south. adults (56%) say Black people are more likely than White people to be sentenced to death for committing similar crimes. About six-in-ten (63%) say the expiry penalty does not deter people from committing serious crimes, and nearly viii-in-ten (78%) say there is some chance that an innocent person will exist executed.

Opinions about the decease punishment vary by party, instruction and race and ethnicity. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are much more likely than Democrats and Autonomous leaners to favor the death penalty for convicted murderers (77% vs. 46%). Those with less formal education are also more likely to support it: Around two-thirds of those with a loftier school diploma or less (68%) favor the expiry penalty, compared with 63% of those with some college education, 49% of those with a bachelor'south caste and 44% of those with a postgraduate degree. Majorities of White (63%), Asian (63%) and Hispanic adults (56%) back up the capital punishment, but Black adults are evenly divided, with 49% in favor and 49% opposed.

Views of the death penalty differ past religious affiliation. Around 2-thirds of Protestants in the U.S. (66%) favor death sentence, though back up is much higher amid White evangelical Protestants (75%) and White non-evangelical Protestants (73%) than information technology is among Blackness Protestants (l%). Effectually six-in-ten Catholics (58%) likewise support capital punishment, a figure that includes 61% of Hispanic Catholics and 56% of White Catholics.

Atheists oppose the death penalty about as strongly as Protestants favor it

Opposition to the death sentence besides varies amidst the religiously unaffiliated. Effectually two-thirds of atheists (65%) oppose it, every bit practice more than one-half of agnostics (57%). Amongst those who say their faith is "cipher in particular," 63% support death sentence.

Support for the capital punishment is consistently higher in online polls than in phone polls. Survey respondents sometimes give unlike answers depending on how a poll is conducted. In a series of contemporaneous Pew Enquiry Middle surveys fielded online and on the phone betwixt September 2019 and August 2020, Americans consistently expressed more back up for the death sentence in a self-administered online format than in a survey administered on the telephone by a live interviewer. This blueprint was more pronounced among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents than amidst Republicans and GOP leaners, according to an analysis of the survey results.

Phone polls accept shown a long-term turn down in public support for the capital punishment. In phone surveys conducted by Pew Enquiry Center betwixt 1996 and 2020, the share of U.Southward. adults who favor the death penalty vicious from 78% to 52%, while the share of Americans expressing opposition rose from 18% to 44%. Phone surveys conducted by Gallup found a similar decrease in support for capital punishment during this time span.

A majority of states have the death penalty, but far fewer use it regularly. Equally of July 2021, the death penalty is authorized by 27 states and the federal authorities – including the U.Southward. Section of Justice and the U.South. military – and prohibited in 23 states and the Commune of Columbia, according to the Death sentence Information Heart. But even in many of the jurisdictions that authorize the death penalty, executions are rare: thirteen of these states, along with the U.S. military, oasis't carried out an execution in a decade or more. That includes iii states – California, Oregon and Pennsylvania – where governors take imposed formal moratoriums on executions.

A map showing that most states have the death penalty, but significantly fewer use it regularly

A growing number of states have done away with the death sentence in contempo years, either through legislation or a court ruling. Virginia, which has carried out more than executions than any state except Texas since 1976, abolished capital punishment in 2021. It followed Colorado (2020), New Hampshire (2019), Washington (2018), Delaware (2016), Maryland (2013), Connecticut (2012), Illinois (2011), New Mexico (2009), New Jersey (2007) and New York (2004).

Death sentences have steadily decreased in recent decades. There were 2,570 people on decease row in the U.S. at the end of 2019, downwards 29% from a meridian of 3,601 at the end of 2000, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). New death sentences have too declined sharply: 31 people were sentenced to death in 2019, far below the more than 320 who received death sentences each year between 1994 and 1996. In recent years, prosecutors in some U.S. cities – including Orlando and Philadelphia – accept vowed not to seek the decease penalty, citing concerns over its application.

Nearly all (98%) of the people who were on death row at the cease of 2019 were men. Both the hateful and median historic period of the nation'due south death row population was 51. Black prisoners accounted for 41% of decease row inmates, far higher than their 13% share of the nation's adult population that year. White prisoners accounted for 56%, compared with their 77% share of the adult population. (For both Blackness and White Americans, these figures include those who place as Hispanic. Overall, about 15% of death row prisoners in 2019 identified as Hispanic, according to BJS.)

A line graph showing that death sentences, executions have trended downward in U.S. since late 1990s

Annual executions are far below their peak level. Nationally, 17 people were put to death in 2020, the fewest since 1991 and far below the modern peak of 98 in 1999, according to BJS and the Death penalty Information Center. The COVID-19 outbreak disrupted legal proceedings in much of the country in 2020, causing some executions to be postponed.

Fifty-fifty as the overall number of executions in the U.S. barbarous to a 29-twelvemonth low in 2020, the federal authorities ramped upward its utilise of the capital punishment. The Trump administration executed 10 prisoners in 2020 and another iii in January 2021; prior to 2020, the federal government had carried out a full of three executions since 1976.

The Biden assistants has taken a different arroyo from its predecessor. In July 2021, Attorney Full general Merrick Garland ordered a halt in federal executions while the Justice Department reviews its policies and procedures.

A line graph showing that prisoners executed in 2019 spent an average of 22 years on death row

The boilerplate fourth dimension betwixt sentencing and execution in the U.S. has increased sharply since the 1980s. In 1984, the average time between sentencing and execution was 74 months, or a piffling over six years, according to BJS. By 2019, that figure had more than tripled to 264 months, or 22 years. The average prisoner awaiting execution at the finish of 2019, meanwhile, had spent nearly 19 years on expiry row.

A variety of factors explain the increase in time spent on decease row, including lengthy legal appeals by those sentenced to death and challenges to the way states and the federal government carry out executions, including the drugs used in lethal injections. In California, more death row inmates take died from natural causes or suicide than from executions since 1978, according to the state's Section of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Note: This is an update to a post originally published May 28, 2015.