By the end of 2025 America was on track to execute 47 people, nearly double the previous year's tally and the highest in nearly two decades. Florida, on track for its deadliest year on record by far, was responsible for most of the surge. But a handful of southern states that had paused executions for years also resumed them.
Support for capital punishment has hit a 50-year low, though 52% of Americans still favour it. Jurors have soured on it: since 1996, the number of new death sentences has fallen steeply. Since 1973, 201 death-row inmates have been exonerated.
In 2019 a more conservative-leaning bench changed course in Bucklew v Precythe, raising the bar for what counts as cruel and unusual punishment — laying the groundwork for states to test new methods beyond lethal injection — and declaring that "last-minute stays should be the extreme exception, not the norm". During Donald Trump's first term, he presided over the executions of 13 people in the final six months, the first bout of federal executions in 17 years.
In 2025 the justices did not pause a single execution, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre. Nor did they intervene in cases of obvious suffering: in May a three-officer firing squad in South Carolina missed a man's heart, leaving him to die slowly; in October an Alabama inmate thrashed for nearly 40 minutes as he suffocated from nitrogen gas.
In 1977 the Supreme Court prohibited capital punishment for rapists, and in 2008 clarified that the ban applied even for child rape. In November 2025 Florida's attorney-general said he would seek the death penalty for a nanny who molested children, with the explicit aim of getting the court to overturn its precedent.
Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative has argued that the court's retreat has emboldened states to pursue executions they once would not have and to be more "experimental" in how they kill.
Ron DeSantis, Florida's governor, ramped up executions while running for president in the 2024 primary, then paused them once he dropped out. In Oklahoma an elected judge refused the Department of Corrections's plea to slow the pace of executions to avoid officer burnout and told them to "man up" (he was later overruled).
Dead? No excuse for laying off work.