The number of new death sentences across the U.S. increased last year, as did the number of states imposing them, but public support for capital punishment continues to be at historic lows, the Death Penalty Information Center said in a year-end report published last month.

Ten states imposed new death sentences in 2024, up from seven in the previous year, for a total of 26 new sentences, up from 21 in 2023.

Notably, about one-third of death sentences imposed last year were recommended by nonunanimous juries in two states. Florida, which in 2023 enacted a law lowering the minimum number of votes needed to recommend a death sentence to just eight out of 12 jurors, imposed six nonunanimous death sentences, while Alabama imposed three.

Nine states carried out a total of 25 executions in 2024, the second time the number has risen in the last two years after 18 people were put to death in 2022, and 24 in 2023. Four states — Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas — accounted for two-thirds of the executions. At the same time, Utah, South Carolina and Indiana conducted their first executions in more than a decade, according to the DPI report.

Despite the uptick, the number of executions continued to be significantly lower than in 1999, when they peaked at 98, according to the report.

Robin M. Maher, the DPI's executive director, told Law360 that the data shows that capital punishment continues to be used in "extreme isolation" across the country. She pointed out that 2024 was the 10th consecutive year in which fewer than 50 new death sentences were imposed and fewer than 30 executions were carried out.

"That's an important long-term trend," Maher said. "The use of the death penalty is no longer a national story or an American story, it's really a story about locality."

Florida imposed the highest number of new death sentences overall last year: seven. The 10 states that sentenced people to the death penalty also include Arizona, California, Idaho, Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas.

Meanwhile, public support for the death penalty continues its downward shift. A Gallup poll published in October that aggregated data from its annual crime surveys found that an average of 54% of Americans said they supported capital punishment from 2020 to 2024, down from 62% from the period between 2010 and 2016, and from 66% recorded between 2000 and 2006.

But perhaps more importantly, the same poll found that more than half of young U.S. adults ages 18 through 43 now oppose the death penalty.

Maher said the poll data shows that the generational divide "is remarkable and it's growing" and she pointed to high-profile capital cases that are getting the public's attention for what are perceived as problems of fairness and accuracy in the death penalty system.

She mentioned the case of Marcellus Williams, a man convicted of murder who was exe­cut­ed in Missouri on Sept. 24 despite the objections of a local prosecutor who said his trial was con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly unfair, in part because the key evidence in the case, the murder weapon, appeared to have been contaminated by state prosecutors.

The temporarily halted execution of Robert Leslie Roberson III, a Texas man who was convicted of killing his 2-year-old daughter by shaking her violently — a medical diagnosis that has been challenged by some experts — and the U.S. Supreme Court argu­ments in the case involving Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip have also "elevated the issue of innocence" and brought the public to question the fairness of capital punishment, the DPI report says.

Currently, 23 U.S. states have abolished the death penalty. Through 2024, six out of the 27 states still allowing capital punishment all had governor-issued moratoriums in place that halted executions while state governments dealt with issues concerning their execution methods, in particular the availability of drugs necessary to kill prisoners. But toward the end of last year, at least two states said they had resolved the issues and planned on restarting executions.

On Nov. 26, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said the state will again start seeking the death penalty in 2025 following a two-year hiatus. And on Dec. 27, the Tennessee Department of Correction announced that it was shifting to a single-drug lethal injection method utilizing pentobarbital, and hinted that it was ready to resume executions after putting them on hold in May 2022.

Eight states tried and failed to reinstate the death penalty last year. One state — Tennessee — successfully expanded the number of death penalty-eligible crimes to include nonhomicide crimes, following in the footsteps of Florida, which in 2023 enacted a law allowing capital punishment for sex crimes involving children.

In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Kennedy v. Louisiana that the death penal­ty for crimes other than homicides vio­late the Eighth Amendment's pro­hi­bi­tion against cru­el and unusual punishment.

Last year, after Alabama became the first state to use nitrogen gas to execute prisoners, Louisiana passed a law adopting the new execution method as an alternative to lethal injection, the only one of several states who attempted to do so.

Meanwhile, several states proposed laws that would exclude people with severe mental illness from death penalty eligibility, an issue that generated significant public debate in recent years, but none of those efforts were successful. Only Kentucky and Ohio currently have laws granting those restrictions. Efforts to abolish the death penalty as a whole continue in more than a dozen states, the DPI report says.

Maher said that all states that executed people last year have secrecy statutes in place that prevent the public from understanding critical details about how the death penalty is used. That secrecy involves, for instance, the identification and provenance of lethal injection drugs and training of staff involved in executions.

Three out of the four executions Alabama carried out, for example, involved the use of nitrogen gas. Media accounts of those executions described prisoners appearing to be in distress during the process, Maher said.

Alabama has a strict secrecy provision in place that prevents the public from understanding many of the details about the nitrogen gas method, and states that are now planning to resume executions are also passing secrecy provisions to shield their execution protocols from public scrutiny, Maher said.

"This is just really a very troubling development," she said. "It's antithetical to a democratic society and principles of good governance that require elected officials to be transparent and accountable for the decisions that they make."

--Graphics by Ben Jay. Editing by Jay Jackson Jr.

Have a story idea for Access to Justice? Reach us at accesstojustice@law360.com.