Most U.S. adults support the death penalty for people convicted of murder, according to an April 2021 Pew Research Center survey. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, majorities believe the death penalty is not practical in a racially neutral way, does not deter people from committing serious crimes and does not accept enough safeguards to foreclose an innocent person from beingness executed.

Utilize of the death penalisation has gradually declined in the Us in recent decades. A growing number of states have abolished it, and death sentences and executions have become less mutual. Just the story is not one of continuous decline across all levels of government. While state-level executions have decreased, the federal government put more prisoners to death under President Donald Trump than at any point since the U.S. Supreme Courtroom reinstated majuscule punishment in 1976.

As debates over the death sentence go on in the U.S., hither's a closer look at public opinion on the consequence, also as key facts nigh the nation'due south apply of upper-case letter punishment.

This Pew Inquiry Heart analysis examines public opinion near the death sentence in the The states and explores how the nation has used death sentence in recent decades.

The public opinion findings cited here are based primarily on a Pew Enquiry Eye survey of 5,109 U.Southward. adults, conducted from April v to 11, 2021. Everyone who took function in the survey is a member of the Center's American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey console that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way near all U.Southward. adults accept a chance of option. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.Southward. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more well-nigh the ATP'southward methodology. Hither are the questions used from this survey, along with responses, and its methodology.

Findings about the administration of the death penalty – including the number of states with and without capital punishment, the annual number of death sentences and executions, the demographics of those on death row and the average amount of time spent on death row – come from the Death Penalty Information Eye and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Half-dozen-in-ten U.S. adults strongly or somewhat favor the capital punishment for convicted murderers, according to the April 2021 survey. A similar share (64%) say the death penalty 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

Support for capital punishment is strongly associated with the view that it is morally justified in sure cases. Nine-in-ten of those who favor the death penalisation say information technology is morally justified when someone commits a crime like murder; but a quarter of those who oppose death penalty see it every bit morally justified.

A majority of Americans take concerns about the fairness of the death sentence and whether it serves as a deterrent confronting serious crime. More than half of U.Southward. adults (56%) say Blackness people are more probable than White people to be sentenced to expiry for committing like crimes. About six-in-ten (63%) say the capital punishment does not deter people from committing serious crimes, and well-nigh eight-in-x (78%) say there is some risk that an innocent person will be executed.

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

Views of the capital punishment differ by religious affiliation. Around ii-thirds of Protestants in the U.South. (66%) favor capital punishment, though support is much higher amidst White evangelical Protestants (75%) and White non-evangelical Protestants (73%) than it is among Black Protestants (50%). Around half dozen-in-ten Catholics (58%) also support death sentence, 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 penalty also varies amongst the religiously unaffiliated. Effectually two-thirds of atheists (65%) oppose it, as exercise more half of agnostics (57%). Among those who say their organized religion is "nothing in particular," 63% support death sentence.

Support for the decease penalty is consistently higher in online polls than in phone polls. Survey respondents sometimes requite unlike answers depending on how a poll is conducted. In a series of contemporaneous Pew Enquiry Center surveys fielded online and on the phone between September 2019 and August 2020, Americans consistently expressed more support for the death penalty in a cocky-administered online format than in a survey administered on the phone by a live interviewer. This pattern was more pronounced amongst Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents than among Republicans and GOP leaners, according to an analysis of the survey results.

Phone polls have shown a long-term decline in public back up for the death penalty. In phone surveys conducted by Pew Inquiry Center between 1996 and 2020, the share of U.S. adults who favor the death sentence fell from 78% to 52%, while the share of Americans expressing opposition rose from xviii% to 44%. Phone surveys conducted by Gallup found a like decrease in back up for capital punishment during this time span.

A majority of states have the death sentence, but far fewer employ it regularly. Every bit of July 2021, the death sentence is authorized by 27 states and the federal regime – including the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.Southward. military – and prohibited in 23 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Death Penalty Data Center. Just even in many of the jurisdictions that qualify the death penalty, executions are rare: 13 of these states, along with the U.S. armed forces, 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 penalty in recent years, either through legislation or a court ruling. Virginia, which has carried out more executions than whatsoever 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 United mexican states (2009), New Jersey (2007) and New York (2004).

Death sentences have steadily decreased in recent decades. There were two,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, co-ordinate to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). New death sentences have also declined sharply: 31 people were sentenced to death in 2019, far below the more than 320 who received decease sentences each year between 1994 and 1996. In contempo years, prosecutors in some U.S. cities – including Orlando and Philadelphia – take vowed not to seek the decease penalty, citing concerns over its application.

Nearly all (98%) of the people who were on decease row at the end of 2019 were men. Both the mean and median age of the nation's death row population was 51. Black prisoners accounted for 41% of death row inmates, far higher than their thirteen% share of the nation's adult population that twelvemonth. White prisoners accounted for 56%, compared with their 77% share of the adult population. (For both Black and White Americans, these figures include those who identify as Hispanic. Overall, about 15% of death row prisoners in 2019 identified every bit Hispanic, according to BJS.)

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

Almanac executions are far beneath their top level. Nationally, 17 people were put to decease in 2020, the fewest since 1991 and far below the mod elevation of 98 in 1999, according to BJS and the Capital punishment Information Center. The COVID-xix outbreak disrupted legal proceedings in much of the country in 2020, causing some executions to be postponed.

Even every bit the overall number of executions in the U.S. fell to a 29-yr low in 2020, the federal government ramped upwards its use of the death penalty. The Trump assistants executed 10 prisoners in 2020 and another 3 in January 2021; prior to 2020, the federal authorities had carried out a total of three executions since 1976.

The Biden administration has taken a different arroyo from its predecessor. In July 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered a halt in federal executions while the Justice Section 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 time between 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 little over six years, co-ordinate to BJS. By 2019, that figure had more than than tripled to 264 months, or 22 years. The average prisoner pending execution at the stop of 2019, meanwhile, had spent near 19 years on expiry row.

A diversity of factors explain the increment in time spent on death row, including lengthy legal appeals past those sentenced to death and challenges to the fashion states and the federal authorities carry out executions, including the drugs used in lethal injections. In California, more death row inmates have died from natural causes or suicide than from executions since 1978, according to the state'southward Section of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

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