NPR Corrects Claim on Effectiveness of Death Penalty

By Alana Wise Of the 11 U.S. states that executed prisoners in 2025, Florida led the way with 19 executions. Curt Anderson/AP hide caption The number of executions around the globe spiked to a 44-year high in 2025, according to a new report from Amnesty International, with state-sanctioned killings nearly doubling in the United States in the span of a year. A total of 2,707 people were killed in 17 countries related to criminal charges ranging from drug offenses to acts of political dissidence, the human rights organization reported Sunday. That marks a 78% rise in executions from the previous year, when Amnesty recorded 1,518 executions. Iran accounted for most of last year's executions, putting 2,159 people to death — more than double its executions in 2024. In September, Amnesty said that Iran in 2025 had already reached its highest number of executions in 15 years. It attributed the surge partly to the country's increased use of the death penalty "as a tool of state repression and to crush dissent," since 2022, when a sweeping women's rights protest movement erupted. Many countries used the death penalty to enforce strict drug laws, according to Amnesty, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, the latter of which executed at least 356 people in 2025. The nonprofit organization, which supports the abolition of the death penalty, says its execution count does not include suspected thousands of executions carried out in China, which the organization describes as the leading country for executions anywhere in the world. The U.S. similarly saw a sharp increase in prisoner executions — 47 across 11 states in the last year, up from 25 in 2024. The U.S., where the death penalty applies only to murder or treason cases, is the only country in the Americas to have carried out criminal executions last year, Amnesty says. Florida led that count with 19 executions. The state's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has championed the death penalty, hailing it as a "strong deterrent" for crime and "an appropriate punishment for the worst offenders." He's made it easier to impose the punishment: In 2023, he lowered Florida's legal threshold for the death penalty, eliminating the requirement for a jury to unanimously recommend the punishment. Justin Mazzola, deputy director for research at Amnesty International, says the "huge spike" in U.S. executions is "tied specifically to what was happening in Florida." "Normally, Florida would only execute anywhere between one to two, sometimes a spike of six in a single year," he said. "Last year, they executed 19 individuals, so almost one every couple of weeks," Mazzola said. Amnesty International describes the death penalty as the "ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment." Mazzola argues that the increased use of the death penalty in the U.S. trends against the American public's growing opposition to the practice. The support for capital punishment peaked in 1994 at 80%, according to Gallup, but has fallen precipitously, Mazzola said, "as people understand more and more about all the issues that are involved in the death penalty, from racism and targeting of people from low-income backgrounds, to issues around mental health and intellectual disabilities." Today, support for the death penalty in the U.S. hovers at a five-decade low: 52% of Americans support capital punishment — the lowest since 1972, according to October polling data from Gallup. A recent report from the Death Penalty Information Center backs that trend. The center studies state executions but does not take a stance on whether it should be abolished. "Our own research shows that the majority of U.S. juries are rejecting death sentences for a variety of reasons," says the center's executive director Robin Maher, citing concerns of fairness and wrongful conviction. "I think it's a growing acknowledgment that the death penalty is a failed policy. That is the number of people known to be under sentence of death in Texas at the end of 2025, according to the Amnesty International report. Sponsor Message Become an NPR sponsor