Capital punishment has been rarer in recent years, but 2025 has brought a complete reversal. This year has seen the most death row inmates put to death in a decade, a trend that will likely only continue under President Donald Trump, who is a proponent of the death penalty.
How many executions have taken place this year?
There have been 43 prisoners executed across 11 states from January to November, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Identifying a “previous year in which the prevalence of executions in the U.S. rivaled the current one requires looking back at least a decade,” said CBS News. The last time at least 43 people were executed in a single year was 2012.
October was also the “busiest month for the death penalty in nearly 15 years,” said USA Today. Seven people were executed last month, making it the “single busiest month for executions in the U.S. since May 2011.” Florida far and away leads executions by state in 2025, with a Nov. 13 execution of a child killer marking the “record 16th death sentence carried out under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis,” said The Associated Press.
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Why are executions on the rise?
There are several reasons, but it is “largely a political effort,” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, to CBS. And it is unlikely to change the perception of executions. The number “does represent an increase from where we were in years’ past, but there's absolutely no evidence it represents a change in public support for the death penalty by Americans.”
In fact, the number of people on death row “represents levels of support that are usually decades out of date,” Maher said to PBS NewsHour. Many people currently scheduled for execution “were sentenced to death by juries usually many years, even decades, ago when public support for the death penalty was much higher and there were very different prosecution policies in place.”
The Trump administration has also “talked a lot about the death penalty and has not made any secret about their enthusiasm” over it, Maher said to CBS. Unlike administrations where the president is anti-death penalty, this “environment has made it easier” for states to “schedule executions to curry favor” with Trump. Many states that are “actively executing people are states that have governors who are politically aligned with the president on this,” said John Blume, the director of the Death Penalty Project at Cornell University, to CBS.
The administration has also pushed the death penalty via legislation. Trump in January “signed an executive order reinstating federal executions while encouraging states to expand the use of capital punishment,” said Mother Jones. States have also been forced to look for alternative execution methods during this time, as drug companies have “consistently said that they don’t want their drugs used in these lethal injections,” said Jeff Hood, a death row spiritual adviser, to Mother Jones. What “states have turned to is more novel ways of executing people,” including “firing squads” and a “process called nitrogen hypoxia.” Nobody “really knew what it was going to be like.”
