Corrections staff dismantle the death row lethal injection facility at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, Calif., in 2019 after Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a moratorium on the state’s death penalty. California is one of four states with moratoriums in place. (Photo by California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via Getty Images)
States are moving in sharply different directions on the death penalty, with some looking to broaden when and how executions occur while others try to scale them back or end them entirely.
Lawmakers in more than half of the states have introduced over 100 bills this year to either expand or limit capital punishment, to alter execution protocols, and to change how death sentences are imposed, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that studies capital punishment. The group does not take a position on the death penalty, but it is critical of how it is carried out.
Some of the bills seeking to expand the death penalty would have included crimes that have been hot-button issues, such as the killing of police officers, sexual offenses against children, abortion and crimes committed by people living in the country illegally. Lawmakers in at least seven states this year also have attempted to legalize alternative methods of execution.
Earlier in the year, however, some Republican legislators in conservative states — including Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio and Oklahoma — proposed measures to abolish the death penalty or impose moratoriums to halt pending and future executions. None of those efforts advanced through their legislatures.
Georgia, meanwhile, enacted a law barring the execution of people with intellectual disabilities.
Nationally, and with about two months left in the year, states have carried out 41 executions. This marks the largest number of executions in the nation since 2012, when there were 43. Five more are scheduled in Florida, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee.
“Executions mark a particular moment in time. They mark the punitiveness of the moment. … It’s no surprise to me to see execution spiking,” Corinna Lain, a law professor at the University of Richmond, told Stateline. Lain also is the author of the book “Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection.”
The surge in executions comes as President Donald Trump has encouraged use of the death penalty. On his first day in office in January, he signed an executive order ending the Biden-era federal moratorium on executions and directing the U.S. attorney general to seek the death penalty “for all crimes of a severity demanding its use.”
The order requires federal prosecutors to pursue capital punishment in two circumstances — when a law enforcement officer is killed or when the accused is an immigrant living in the country illegally — regardless of other factors. It also instructs the U.S. Department of Justice to help states obtain lethal injection drugs, though it remains unclear how it would do so.
Stateline asked the Department of Justice whether U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has taken any steps to help states obtain lethal injection drugs. The department declined to comment.
Trump’s January executive order further calls on the U.S. attorney general to urge state and local prosecutors to pursue the death penalty in all eligible cases and to seek the reversal of Supreme Court precedents that limit state and federal authority to impose capital punishment.
The order applies only to federal crimes; states set their own death penalty laws.
Since 2009, seven states — Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia — have legislatively abolished the death penalty, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Twenty-seven states allow the death penalty, but four — California, Ohio, Oregon and Pennsylvania — have paused executions.
Seventeen death penalty-related bills were enacted into law this year across nine states, according to the Death Penalty Information Center’s legislative tracker: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, North Carolina and Oklahoma. Seven of those laws expand death eligibility or add aggravating factors for capital cases. Others focus on limiting eligibility, modifying execution protocols — including adding alternative methods of execution — or changing the appeals process.
Despite the surge in executions this year, the number of new death sentences imposed on convicted murderers continues to fall amid concerns about how executions are carried out, and because prosecutors are seeking the punishment less often. And both the number of executions and new sentences remain far below their historic highs in the 1990s.
“Death sentencing is falling in the United States for reasons that an executive order cannot fix,” Lain said.
‘Iryna’s Law’
One of the most sweeping measures this year came out of North Carolina.
Known as “Iryna’s Law,” it makes broad changes to the state’s criminal code following the August killing of Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s light rail system. The law imposes stricter pretrial release conditions on defendants, mandates mental health evaluations for some defendants, shortens appeal timelines in capital cases and adds new execution methods.
“I hope we can finally get justice for victims’ families and for the people of North Carolina,” Republican state Sen. Phil Berger said in a news release. Berger has long backed efforts to resume executions in North Carolina. The state has not carried out an execution since 2006. There are 122 people on North Carolina’s death row.
Under the law, courts must schedule hearings for any capital case filings older than two years by December 2026 and resolve them by the end of 2027 — an accelerated timeline aimed at moving stalled cases through the system. The measure also adds a new aggravating factor allowing prosecutors to seek the death penalty for murders committed on public transportation.
The law lifts state bans on electrocution and lethal gas as execution methods, though it keeps lethal injection as the primary method. If lethal injection were to be ruled unconstitutional, the state could adopt any execution method used elsewhere that has not been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Democratic Gov. Josh Stein signed the measure into law in October, but raised concerns about the provisions that open the possibility of alternative execution methods.
“It’s barbaric,” Stein said in a video explaining his decision to sign the bill. “There will be no firing squads in North Carolina during my time as governor.”
Florida has led the nation with 15 executions so far in 2025. Alabama and Texas have had the second-highest number of executions this year, with five each. The vast majority of executions this year occurred in Southern states, with only five taking place elsewhere — two in Arizona, two in Indiana and one in Missouri.
States have faced chronic shortages of lethal injection drugs for years, and many manufacturers and pharmacies refuse to supply them for ethical reasons. Combined with high costs and drugs that often expire before use, these challenges have forced delays, cancellations or the use of alternative execution methods.
Executions often occur decades after the original sentence, as people on death row may spend up to 30 years exhausting their appeals. Nationally, nearly 2,100 people are currently on death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Legal precedents
Expanding the death penalty to crimes beyond murder has become a central focus of federal and state officials seeking to reshape capital punishment laws.
A key precedent comes from the 2008 Supreme Court case Kennedy v. Louisiana, in which the court ruled it unconstitutional to impose the death penalty for crimes other than homicide or crimes against the state. In that case, a man had been given the death penalty after raping his then-8-year-old stepdaughter.
In September, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier led 15 Republican state attorneys general in sending a letter to Bondi and White House counsel David Warrington, seeking federal support to challenge Supreme Court precedent and uphold death sentences for child rape.
“We believe repairing Kennedy’s flawed outcome is within the power of the States,” the attorneys general wrote.
The letter cited Trump’s January executive order and noted the recent enactment of state laws authorizing the death penalty for child sexual abuse in several states, including Arkansas, Florida and Tennessee. This year, both Idaho and Oklahoma made sexual assaults of children offenses eligible for death.
“For many victims, the pain and trauma never fully go away,” Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, a Republican, wrote in an email to Stateline. “The death penalty is entirely appropriate and necessary to deter future wrongdoers and achieve justice for the victims.”
Griffin also wrote that he hopes to bring a case before the Supreme Court to challenge the Kennedy precedent in the future.
Sentencing trends
So far this year, 16 people across the country have been sentenced to death — one of the lowest totals in more than a decade, according to Lain, who independently tracks new death sentences. In 2024, 26 people were sentenced to death.
She said this reflects a long-term shift: Juries and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty less often, but the states that continue to use it are doing so more aggressively.
“Today’s death sentences are tomorrow’s executions,” Lain said in an interview. “If you don’t have new death sentences feeding the machinery of death, the death penalty will die on the vine.”
The push to expand the death penalty comes as support for it has waned. A Gallup poll in October found 52% of Americans back capital punishment for murder, down sharply from 80% in 1994.
Critics have long highlighted persistent racial disparities and the risk of wrongful convictions. Since 1973, at least 201 former death row prisoners have been exonerated, and about 40% of current death row inmates are Black, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
A 2024 analysis by the nonprofit Reprieve, which advocates against the death penalty, found that since 1982, 8% of lethal injection executions of Black people were botched, compared with 4% of executions of white people. Lethal injection is the most commonly used execution method across the country, though it is also the method with the most recorded botches or mistakes.
The high costs of imprisoning death row inmates, buying lethal injection drugs from unregulated “gray market” compounding pharmacies and navigating decades-long appeals — along with questions about the death penalty’s effectiveness as a deterrent and the secrecy surrounding how executions are carried out — have cast uncertainty over the future of capital punishment across the states.
Indiana Republican Gov. Mike Braun revealed in June that the state spent nearly $1.2 million on four doses of execution drugs, half of which — $600,000 worth — expired before they could be used.
Braun said he does not plan to purchase more drugs, saying, “[S]omething that costs, I think, $300,000 a pop that has a 90-day shelf life — I’m not going to be for putting it on the shelf and then letting them expire.”
Idaho has faced similar challenges. In court filings, state officials said they spent $200,000 on execution drugs that went unused, and a new facility for firing squad executions is expected to cost more than $1 million.
In Texas, state officials have spent more than $775,000 on pentobarbital, one of the commonly used drugs in lethal injections, since October 2024, according to records obtained by NBC News. Tennessee spent $600,000 on lethal injection drugs between 2017 and March 2025, according to records obtained by The Tennessean. During that period, the state carried out two executions via lethal injection.
“At some point, states have to look at the death penalty and say, ‘Is it worth the money?’” Lain said.
Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at ahernandez@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Georgia Recorder, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
