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Death Penalty Statistics

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The principal sources of death penalty statistics, with links to specific resources at each site, are included here. These sites provide detailed information on executions, death row populations, jurisdictions authorizing capital punishment, capital offenses, Supreme Court death penalty cases, changes in state statutes, and other information. Detailed information about executions, including the names of prisoners executed in the U.S., offense information, race of offender and victim, state of execution, and method of execution can also be found through sites listed here. Additionally, we provide links to documents providing results of public opinion polls on issues surrounding the death penalty.
     See also Specific Issues: Specific Populations for resources with statistics on women, juveniles, and mentally retarded persons on the nation's death rows. See The International Context for statistics on the death penalty worldwide.
Disclaimer: The Justice Center is not responsible for the content of any outside site linked here, nor does a listing here imply an endorsement of a site's opinions or content or a guarantee of its accuracy. For further information about this site, including answers to questions by students, see the FAQ.

Sources of Death Penalty Statistics
 The sites linked here are among the most comprehensive sources of statistics on the death penalty in the United States.

Bureau of Justice Statistics: Capital Punishment Statistics
 The Bureau of Justice Statistics is part of the U.S. Department of Justice and collects annual capital punishment statistics from the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government. Death penalty statistics are summarized here, and there are some downloadable statistical spreadsheets. BJS capital punishment bulletins provide statistics on number of prisoners on the nation's death rows, number of executions, Supreme Court cases during a given year, changes in state capital punishment laws, capital offenses defined by state statutes, characteristics of death row prisoners, and other information. Bulletins are generally available in text-only or Adobe Acrobat format.

ASC Critical Criminology Division: Death Penalty Information & Resources
 The Critical Criminology Division is part of the American Society of Criminology and advocates the abolition of the death penalty. The site includes text-only copies of BJS capital punishment bulletins that are not currently available at the BJS web site.

Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics
 This annual publication of the Bureau of Justice Statistics is maintained online by the State University of New York at Albany. Tables in the Sourcebook below require the free Adobe Acrobat reader.

Other Sources of Death Penalty Statistics

Executions
 The pages linked here provide detailed information on prisoners executed in the United States.

Death Penalty Information Center: Executions in the United States
 DPIC provides name, date of execution, state, method of execution, and racial status of offender and victim(s) for executions by year since 1976, including the current years. See additionally these resources:

  • Execution Database. A fully searchable database of all modern executions in the U.S. since 1976.
  • Executions in the U.S. 1608-1987: The Espy File. Compiled by M. Watt Espy and John Ortiz Smylka and made available through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (1994), this list includes 14,634 executions conducted in the U.S. and its predecessor colonies from 1608 to 1987.

Public Opinion Polls on the Death Penalty
 In 1965, according to a Harris poll (Adobe Acrobat file), 38 percent of U.S. poll respondents believed in the death penalty; 47 percent opposed it. In 2001, 67 percent said they believed in the death penalty and only 26 percent opposed it. A 1996 poll (no longer available online) conducted by Sam Houston State University found that 73.4 percent of respondents nationwide favored the death penalty for persons convicted of murder, but of those, 20.1 percent no longer favored the death penalty if convicted murderers were given a "true" life sentence -- that is, sentenced to life imprisonment without possiblity of parole.

Green, Melissa S. ( 24-Mar-2005 ). "Death Penalty Statistics." In Melissa S. Green (1998-2005), Focus on the Death Penalty (website). Justice Center, University of Alaska Anchorage. <http://justice.uaa.alaska.edu/death/stats.html> (accessed date).

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