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, based on a brand new report from Amnesty Worldwide, with state-sanctioned killings practically doubling in the USA within the span of a yr.
A complete of two,707 individuals had been killed in 17 international locations associated to prison prices 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 yr, when Amnesty recorded 1,518 executions.
Iran accounted for many of final yr’s executions, placing 2,159 individuals to dying — greater than double its executions in 2024. In September, Amnesty mentioned 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 dying penalty “as a device of state repression and to crush dissent,” since 2022, when a sweeping girls’s rights protest motion erupted.
Many international locations used the dying penalty to implement strict drug legal guidelines, based on Amnesty, together with Iran and Saudi Arabia, the latter of which executed at the very least 356 individuals in 2025. The nonprofit group, which helps the abolition of the dying penalty, says its execution depend doesn’t embody suspected 1000’s of executions carried out in China, which the group describes because the main nation for executions wherever on this planet.
The U.S. equally noticed a pointy enhance in prisoner executions — 47 throughout 11 states within the final yr, up from 25 in 2024. The U.S., the place the dying penalty applies solely to homicide or treason circumstances, is the one nation within the Americas to have carried out prison executions final yr, Amnesty says.
Florida led that depend with 19 executions. The state’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has championed the dying penalty, hailing it as a “sturdy deterrent” for crime and “an applicable punishment for the worst offenders.” He is made it simpler to impose the punishment: In 2023, he lowered Florida’s authorized threshold for the dying penalty, eliminating the requirement for a jury to unanimously suggest the punishment.
Justin Mazzola, deputy director for analysis at Amnesty Worldwide, says the “enormous spike” in U.S. executions is “tied particularly to what was taking place in Florida.”
“Usually, Florida would solely execute wherever between one to 2, generally a spike of six in a single yr,” he mentioned. “Final yr, they executed 19 people, so nearly one each couple of weeks,” Mazzola mentioned.
Amnesty Worldwide describes the dying penalty because the “final merciless, inhuman and degrading punishment.”
Mazzola argues that the elevated use of the dying penalty within the U.S. developments in opposition to the American public’s rising opposition to the apply.
The assist for capital punishment peaked in 1994 at 80%, based on Gallup, however has fallen precipitously, Mazzola mentioned, “as individuals perceive increasingly about all the problems which might be concerned within the dying penalty, from racism and concentrating on of individuals from low-income backgrounds, to points round psychological well being and mental disabilities.”
As we speak, assist for the dying penalty within the U.S. hovers at a five-decade low: 52% of People assist capital punishment — the bottom since 1972, based on October polling knowledge from Gallup.
A latest report from the Demise Penalty Info Middle backs that pattern. The middle research state executions however doesn’t take a stance on whether or not it needs to be abolished.
“Our personal analysis reveals that almost all of U.S. juries are rejecting dying sentences for quite a lot of causes,” says the middle’s govt director Robin Maher, citing considerations of equity and wrongful conviction.
“I feel it is a rising acknowledgment that the dying penalty is a failed coverage. It actually is not delivering on the promise it as soon as had of deterring future crime and in punishing an inappropriate method.”
