Of the 11 U.S. states that executed prisoners in 2025, Florida led the way in which with 19 executions.
Curt Anderson/AP
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Curt Anderson/AP
The variety of executions across the globe spiked to a 44-year excessive in 2025, in line with a brand new report from Amnesty Worldwide, with state-sanctioned killings almost doubling in the US within the span of a 12 months.
A complete of two,707 folks have been killed in 17 nations associated to legal fees starting from drug offenses to acts of political dissidence, the human rights group reported Sunday. That marks a 78% rise in executions from the earlier 12 months, when Amnesty recorded 1,518 executions.
Iran accounted for many of final 12 months’s executions, placing 2,159 folks to demise — greater than double its executions in 2024. In September, Amnesty stated that Iran in 2025 had already reached its highest variety of executions in 15 years. It attributed the surge partly to the nation’s elevated use of the demise penalty “as a tool of state repression and to crush dissent,” since 2022, when a sweeping girls’s rights protest motion erupted.
Many nations used the demise penalty to implement strict drug legal guidelines, in line with Amnesty, together with Iran and Saudi Arabia, the latter of which executed no less than 356 folks in 2025. The nonprofit group, which helps the abolition of the demise penalty, says its execution rely doesn’t embrace suspected 1000’s of executions carried out in China, which the group describes because the main nation for executions wherever on the earth.
The U.S. equally noticed a pointy enhance in prisoner executions — 47 throughout 11 states within the final 12 months, up from 25 in 2024. The U.S., the place the demise penalty applies solely to homicide or treason circumstances, is the one nation within the Americas to have carried out legal executions final 12 months, Amnesty says.
Florida led that rely with 19 executions. The state’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has championed the demise penalty, hailing it as a “strong deterrent” for crime and “an appropriate punishment for the worst offenders.” He is made it simpler to impose the punishment: In 2023, he lowered Florida’s authorized threshold for the demise penalty, eliminating the requirement for a jury to unanimously suggest the punishment.
Texas had the second-most executions within the nation at 169, adopted by Alabama and North Carolina.
Justin Mazzola, deputy director for analysis at Amnesty Worldwide, says the “huge spike” in U.S. executions is “tied specifically to what was happening in Florida.”
“Normally, Florida would only execute anywhere between one to two, sometimes a spike of six in a single year,” he stated. “Last year, they executed 19 individuals, so almost one every couple of weeks,” Mazzola stated.
Amnesty Worldwide describes the demise penalty because the “ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.”
Mazzola argues that the elevated use of the demise penalty within the U.S. developments towards the American public’s rising opposition to the follow.
The assist for capital punishment peaked in 1994 at 80%, in line with Gallup, however has fallen precipitously, Mazzola stated, “as people understand more and more about all the issues that are involved in the death penalty, from racism and targeting of people from low-income backgrounds, to issues around mental health and intellectual disabilities.”
Right this moment, assist for the demise penalty within the U.S. hovers at a five-decade low: 52% of Individuals assist capital punishment — the bottom since 1972, in line with October polling knowledge from Gallup.
A current report from the Dying Penalty Info Middle backs that development. The middle research state executions however doesn’t take a stance on whether or not it must be abolished.
“Our own research shows that the majority of U.S. juries are rejecting death sentences for a variety of reasons,” says the middle’s govt director Robin Maher, citing considerations of equity and wrongful conviction.
“I think it’s a growing acknowledgment that the death penalty is a failed policy. It really isn’t delivering on the promise it once had of deterring future crime and in punishing an inappropriate way.”
