America’s waning support for the death penalty
In the span of just over a week, US states carried out a failed execution and completed one by lethal injection, while Pentagon Chief Pete Hegseth has announced plans to livestream an execution of Nidal Hasan, the man convicted of carrying out a mass shooting at a military base in 2009.
The events have reignited a decades-old debate over capital punishment in a country with around 2,000 prisoners on death row. Opponents have pushed for an end to the penalty after Christa Pike’s botched execution, while supporters have doubled down, arguing that the punishment remains appropriate despite concerns about how it is carried out. Even Pope Leo XIV weighed in, denouncing the death penalty as “inadmissible” one day after senior Church officials decried the Pentagon’s plans to livestream the Fort Hood shooter’s execution.
As our Graphic Truth shows, support for the death penalty has been declining in America for thirty years. In 1994, 80% of Americans said they were in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder. By 2025, that figure had fallen to 52%.
Why the decline? A growing cohort of young people who oppose capital punishment has largely driven the shift. Fewer than half of adults born after 1980 support the death penalty, while more than 6 in 10 in older generations do.
A decline in violent crime is another reason for the shift in public sentiment. Between the 1960s and 1980s, crime was one of the biggest concerns among Americans, according to the Center for Crime and Justice Studies. Support for the death penalty rose alongside it. But since the early 1990s and the enactment of the 1994 Crime Bill – which drastically increased prison funding and introduced mandatory minimum sentences – violent crime has fallen dramatically, reaching its lowest point in decades this year. Between 1994 and 2025, support for the death penalty fell by nearly 30 percentage points.
Where does the US stand among its peers? Today, the US ranks fourth globally in executions after China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen due to an increase in executions over the last few years. In 2025, states executed more people than they had in over 15 years, largely driven by an increase in Florida under Republican Governor Ron DeSantis – this year, Florida carried out 19 executions, a record since the state reinstated the penalty in 1976.
No countries in Europe except Belarus and Russia still have the death penalty. Other advanced economies, like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, abolished it in the 1980s and 90s. Japan is one of the few other advanced economies that retain the death penalty, with polls showing 80% of the public believe it is an “unavoidable” component of the justice system
Of those countries that retain the penalty, even fewer allow livestreamed executions. The last high-profile public execution that took place in the US was a 1936 hanging in Kentucky of a Black man accused of raping a white woman. The case drew national backlash toward racially motivated lynchings, and since then, most executions take place in federal prisons with few observers. US law prohibits the recording or broadcasting of federal executions, but this does not apply to military executions. Only Afghanistan, Iran, and Yemen have carried out public executions in the last five years.
If the US goes ahead with the livestream of the Fort Hood shooter’s execution in December, it will join a small group of countries that do so – and within a country that is deeply divided over capital punishment itself.
