DPIC releases year-end report emphasizing “continuing decline of death penalty” in 2021

The Death Penalty Information Center this morning released its annual report here under the heading “The Death Penalty in 2021: Year End Report; Virginia’s Historic Abolition Highlights Continuing Decline of Death Penalty.” Here is the starts of the report’s introduction, with lots of data and details following thereafter:

The death penalty in 2021 was defined by two competing forces: the continuing long-term erosion of capital punishment across most of the country, and extreme conduct by a dwindling number of outlier jurisdictions to continue to pursue death sentences and executions.

Virginia’s path to abolition of the death penalty was emblematic of capital punishment’s receding reach in the United States.  A combination of changing state demographics, eroding public support, high-quality defense representation, and the election of reform prosecutors in many key counties produced a decade with no new death sentences in the Commonwealth.  As the state grappled with its history of slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, and the 70th anniversary of seven wrongful executions, the governor and legislative leaders came to see the end of the death penalty as a crucial step towards racial justice.  On March 24, Virginia became the first southern state to repeal capital punishment, and expanded the death-penalty-free zone on the U.S. Atlantic coast from the Canadian border of Maine to the northern border of the Carolinas.

In the West, where an execution-free zone spans the Pacific coast from Alaska to Mexico, the Oregon Supreme Court began removing prisoners from the state’s death row based on a 2019 law that redefined the crimes that constitute capital murder.  Nationwide, mounting distrust of the death-penalty system was reflected in public opinion polling that measured support for capital punishment at near half-century lows.  With Virginia’s abolition, a majority of states have now abolished the death penalty (23) or have a formal moratorium on its use (3).  An additional ten states have not carried out an execution in at least ten years.

2021 saw historic lows in executions and near historic lows in new death sentences.  As this report goes to press, eighteen people were sentenced to death, tying 2020’s number for the fewest in the modern era of the death penalty, dating back to the Supreme Court ruling in Furman v. Georgia that struck down all existing U.S. death-penalty statutes in 1972.  The eleven executions carried out during the year were the fewest since 1988.  The numbers were unquestionably affected by the pandemic but marked the seventh consecutive year of fewer than 50 death sentences and 30 executions.  Both measures pointed to a death penalty that was geographically isolated, with just three states — Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas — accounting for a majority of both death sentences and executions.