<\/p>\n
US executions have surged in 2025 to the highest level in 16 years, as Donald Trump\u2019s campaign to reinvigorate judicial killings, combined with the US supreme court\u2019s increasing refusal to engage in last-minute pleas for reprieve, have taken a heavy toll.<\/p>\n
A total of 47 men \u2013 they were all male \u2013 have been killed by states operating the death penalty in the course of the year. That was almost double the number in 2024, amounting to the greatest frenzy of capital punishment<\/a> bloodletting in America since 2009.<\/p>\n <\/gu-island><\/p>\n The dramatic jump in the practice of state killing will further separate the US from almost all other developed countries<\/a>. Only Japan, Singapore and Taiwan have staged executions in recent years.<\/p>\n The increase in the US is all the more pronounced given the gradual decline in capital punishment that had been the prevailing wind in the US for most of the past two decades. It stands starkly discordant with the trend in public opinion.<\/p>\n Gallup, which has been taking the pulse of the American public\u2019s views on the death penalty since 1937, found that this year 52% supported it<\/a> for people convicted of murder \u2013 a 50-year low. Most Americans under 55 now oppose the practice.<\/p>\n The Death Penalty Information Center which produces the most comprehensive annual review<\/a> said that the contradictory trends indicate \u201cthe growing disconnect between what elected officials do and what the public wants. The evidence shows that the death penalty in 2025 is increasingly unpopular with the American people even as elected officials schedule executions in search of diminishing political benefits.\u201d<\/p>\n The most prominent of those elected officials is the US president himself. On his first day back in the White House, 20 January, he issued an executive order<\/a>, \u201cRestoring the death penalty\u201d. The \u201crestoring\u201d was a reference both to federal executions, after his predecessor Joe Biden just before Christmas last year commuted the sentences<\/a> of all but three inmates of federal death row, and to the death penalty states which have been less active in recent years.<\/p>\n The order vowed to ensure \u201cthat the laws that authorize capital punishment are respected and faithfully implemented\u201d.<\/p>\n Sister Helen Prejean, the anti-death penalty advocate and author of Dead Man Walking, believes that Trump has set the tone nationally. In a recent press conference held by a fledgling alliance of more than 50 groups, US Campaign to End the Death Penalty, she said: \u201cIt\u2019s in the air, it\u2019s in the national rhetoric sent down from Trump \u2013 you use violence and cruelty to solve social problems\u201d.<\/p>\n The president\u2019s missive to revive capital punishment was channeled through the Department of Justice, which this year authorized more than 20 new capital prosecutions. Trump\u2019s executive order also sent a clear message that resounded through death penalty states: capital punishment is back.<\/p>\n Florida in particular took that sentiment to heart, with stunning results. In 2024 the sunshine state put just one person to death.<\/p>\n This year that number shot up to 19. The killing spree<\/a> ordered by the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, shattered Florida\u2019s previous record of eight executions in a year.<\/p>\n Florida\u2019s supercharged death system sets it apart as an outlier, surpassing even Texas as the leading practitioner of state killings. Together with Alabama, South Carolina and Texas, those four states were responsible for almost three-quarters of this year\u2019s executions.<\/p>\n The number of other states engaging in capital punishment has also ticked up. This year 12 states put their death chambers to active use, up from nine in 2024.<\/p>\n They included Louisiana<\/a>, which ended a dry run of 15 years without executions.<\/p>\n As more states scramble to get back into the game of killing prisoners, their death protocols are also growing more extreme. Louisiana became the second state, after Alabama, to experiment with using nitrogen gas as a means of effectively suffocating condemned individuals.<\/p>\n Witnesses at that nitrogen execution of Jessie Hoffman Jr<\/a> in March said that he visibly shook for several minutes.<\/p>\n South Carolina set out on a different path, carrying out the first execution by firing squad in the US since 2010. Three of the state\u2019s five executions this year deployed the controversial method.<\/p>\n