Number of U.S. Executions Climbs Again

The number of executions in the United States after the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 surpassed 1,600 last year. At 25 death penalties carried out in 2024, U.S. executions rose for the third year in a row after the Covid-19 pandemic as well as legal issues and those connected to the sourcing of deadly injection drugs limited their number previously.

After the turn of the century, the number of executions in the U.S. had continued to fall and hit a low in Covid year 2021 at just 11. According to The Death Penalty Information Center, this rose to 18 again in 2022, 24 in 2023 and 25 in 2024. Execution numbers would have been even lower in 2020 and 2021, had the federal government not resumed executions after a 17 years hiatus at the end of the first term of President Donald Trump. A total of 13 inmates died in federal executions in these two years. After Trump returned to office, his administration has signaled a return to federal executions and a general preference for the death penalty via an executive order and instructions to federal prosecuters.

Following a 2011 EU-wide decision not to export lethal drugs anymore and Pfizer as the last FDA-approved company pulling its products from executions in 2016, U.S. states that carry out the death penalty have run into severe sourcing problems in past years, causing executions by injection to be postponed or not even scheduled. States have since scrambled to find alternative sources to start executions again - which led to some botched attempts using new drugs. Some states have also made alternative execution methods legal or entered them back into use, including the introduction of nitrogen gas in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma. Electrocution remains a legal capital punishment method in eight states and is now the default in South Carolina. In July, the state's Supreme Court ruled that both electrocution and the firing squad could be used as execution methods. In March, a first inmate chose to die by firing squad, while the last prisoner died by electrocution in the state in 2008. Louisiana has also recently reintroduced the electric chair. Utah revived the firing squad in 2015 and Tennessee did in 2023.

Texas has carried out the most executions of any state with 592 since 1976 and 15 in the past three calendar years. Second-ranked Oklahoma executed 125 since reinstatement and nine in 2023, 2024 and 2025, while Virginia killed 113 in total, but hadn't executed anyone since 2017 when the state abolished the death penalty in 2021. Other recently active states for the death penalty are Florida and Missouri, which have executed around 100 people each in the modern era.

On Sept. 26, the number of 1,600 deaths via execution since reinstatement of the death penalty was surpassed. On this day, Emmanuel Littlejohn and Alan Eugene Miller were killed in Oklahoma and Alabama. While Littlejohn was executed despite having been recommended for clemency, Miller died by the controversial method of nitrogen gas inhalation - only the second American to die this way and his second execution after a botched injection attempt in 2022.