Via this post by Robert Dunham at The DP3 Substack, I see that the Legal Defense Fund has released its latest accounting of persons on death rows in the US, Death Row USA, Spring 2025. The LDF document, which runs 60 pages, has lots and lots of death row data and other information, and the substack post provides various highlights. Here is how that post start (with my emphasis added at the end):
The number of prisoners on death rows or facing capital retrials or resentencing proceedings across the United States has fallen to 2,067 as of April 1, 2025, according to the Spring 2025 Death Row U.S.A. (“DRUSA”), a quarterly census of the U.S. death row population by the Legal Defense Fund. The new total represents a decline of 25 prisoners (1.2%) from the 2,092 people whom LDF reported faced active death sentences or possible resentencing at the start of the year.
Historically, the extent of the decline in the national death-row population in any single quarter does not predict what will happen the coming months, although the long-term trends are clear. The nation’s death-row population declined by only 0.6% (14 people) in the first quarter of 2024, but ended the year with 149 fewer death-row prisoners, the largest death-row population decline in more than two decades and the highest annual percentage decline (6.6%) in nearly a half-century. LDF’s Spring 2025 death-row census, released on May 2, reported 160 fewer individuals on death-row or facing continuing jeopardy of capital resentencing than in its Spring 2024 census, marking a one-year decline of 7.2%. LDF has reported a decline in the number of people on death row in the U.S. in every quarterly DRUSA census since January 2010 and in each of the last 24 years. Overall, the U.S. death-row population has fallen 44.5% since its peak of 3,726 at the close of 2000.
As the title of this post hints, I wonder if the consistent and long-running decline in the number of persons on US death rows might be disrupted in coming years. As noted in this post, Prez Trump issued this Executive Order on his first day in office titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” which contains multiple provisions that aspire to “ensure that the laws that authorize capital punishment are respected and faithfully implemented.” Though there are legal and practical limits to how the federal executive branch can directly impact the number of capital charges and sentences (especially in state systems), this EO strikes me as one marker of what I perceive to be a (small?) “vibe shift” in the adminitration of capital punishment that could echo in various ways through death rows.
Though a “vibe shift” in the adminitration of capital punishment may not be tangible (or even real) with regard to the number of death sentences in the US, there already seems to be an increase in the number of executions in the US since Prez Trump took office. Specifically, there were 15 executions in various states in roughly a 90-day perioud after Prez Trump returned to office, and it has been many years since the US has averaged more than an execution per week for such an extended period. Of course, lots of factors with nothing to do with the President influence executon dates and rates, but I still find these various new metrics notable.