I flagged here last month that a flourish of executions in multiple states had been scheduled over just a week, and all five of those executions were ultimately carried out. I now see from this Death Penalty Information Center page that eight more executions are scheduled for the final few months of 2024. If seven of those executions go forward as planned, the US will have completed 26 total execution in 2024, which would be more than in any calendar year since 2015.
Of course, 26 executions in a year is still a relatively paltry number in America’s capital punishment history. In the 1930s, for example, the US averaged well over 150 executions per year. And from 1995 to 2014, the US states executed, on average, 56 persons per year, and hit a modern peak of 98 executions in 1999. Still, I find it fascinating that state executions were trending down in the final years of the Trump Administration and now are trending up in the final years of the Biden Administration. These trends seem especially notable given that candidate Joe Biden pledged to work to “eliminate the death penalty.”
Writing at Inquest, Lee Kovarsky highlights in this new essay how this year’s presidential election could prove an inflection point in modern capital punishment history. The substitle of the piece captures its main theme: “The presidential candidates are worlds apart on the death penalty. The winner could either jolt or sap the energy of the movement to end it.”