FATAL JUSTICE
The Victims of Capital Punishment in the United States
THE DEATH PENALTY: BY THE NUMBERS
*Data only from the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 to present day. Last updated November 2020.
28
The number of U.S. states where the death penalty is still allowed by law.
Despite growing efforts to abolish the death penalty nationwide, a majority of states have yet to do so. Click HERE to contact your legislators and lobby against legalized murder.
1527
Lives taken
... by death penalty states, the federal government, and the U.S. military by means of capital punishment
2,591
Awaiting execution
In all death penalty states and those with moratoriums, death row prisoners await execution, often without a set date. Often, this is due to the inaccessibility of the drugs needed for lethal injection, the only form of execution still used in most states.
22
Defendants executed for crimes committed as juveniles.
Prior to 2005, it was perfectly legal to execute individuals for crimes they committed before the age of 18. In Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty for juveniles on the grounds that it violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
1 IN 10
Prisoners executed in the United States have been "volunteers".
Inmates who "volunteer" for the death penalty essentially give up any and all means of appealing their sentence or delaying their execution. While to do this, inmates must be cleared for mental competency, there has been great concern over past "volunteers" and their mental health. Many cite the fact that they would rather die than spend more time in prison. Suicidal tendencies like these would never be indulged with ordinary citizens, once again giving evidence that inmates are treated as subhuman.
THE DEATH PENALTY IS.....
RACIST.
White people make up less than half of the country’s murder victims, but 80% of people given the death penalty were convicted of killing a white person.
A study from the University of Washington showed that jurors were 4.5 times more likely to impose the death sentence if the defendant was Black rather than white.
Across the board, defendants are far more likely to receive the death penalty if the defendant is white. The statistic ranges by county and state. In Harris County, Texas, murderers with white victims were 2.5 times more likely to receive the death penalty. In Delaware, Black defendants with white victims are 7 times more likely to receive the death penalty as opposed to Black defendants with Black victims.
A 2000 study of federal court cases found that white defendants were 50% more likely to be offered a plea bargain than Black defendants, allowing them to avoid the death penalty.
A 2016 study in Louisiana found that killers of white victims were 14 times more likely to be executed than killers of Black victims, and goes up to 30 times more likely when the victim is a white woman.
EXPENSIVE.
Many people assume that implementing the death penalty saves the state money by avoiding the costs that would otherwise accrue by paying to keep someone in prison for life; the exact opposite is true.
American taxpayers have to cover longer trials and the extensive appeals that comes with sentencing someone to death. If a death sentence isn’t eventually overturned through appeals, it is at least put off by them, often for decades. This means that tax dollars are essentially funding extremely cost-inflated life sentence just because the death penalty was an option in a given case.
Most death rows involve solitary confinement in a separate ward, which requires higher security and other costly measures.
Although similar studies have been conducted in several states, a 2008 study by the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice sums it up. The system with the death penalty cost $137 million annually and would cost $11.5 million annually without it.
INEFFECTIVE.
There is no proof that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to violent crimes
A Death Penalty Information Center study of 30 years of FBI Uniform Crime Reports found that the south had the consistently highest murder rate, reaching six murders per 100,000 residents as of 2018. The south accounts for more than 80% of all executions nationwide, showing that the death penalty is not a deterrent.
A survey of currents and former presidents of the nation’s top criminological societies found that 88% of participants disagreed that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder.
A majority of northeastern states (New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey) have abolished the death penalty. The Northeast has the lowest murder rate per capita of all regions as of 2018 at 3.4 murders per 100,000 people.