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The numbers were unquestionably affected by the pandemic but marked the seventh consecutive year of fewer than 50 death sentences and 30 executions. The eleven executions carried out during the year were the fewest since 1988. 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. An additional ten states have not carried out an execution in at least ten years.Ģ021 saw historic lows in executions and near historic lows in new death sentences. With Virginia’s abolition, a majority of states have now abolished the death penalty (23) or have a formal moratorium on its use (3). 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. 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. ‡ Persons with death sentences in multiple states ^^ New Hampshire prospectively abolished the death penalty May 30, 2019. The bill reduced the state’s two death sentences to life without parole. ^ Virginia abolished the death penalty with an effective date of July 1, 2021. † Data from NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund for July 1 of the year shown Atlantic coast from the Canadian border of Maine to the northern border of the Carolinas.

On March 24, Virginia became the first southern state to repeal capital punishment, and expanded the death-penalty-free zone on the U.S. As the state grappled with its history of slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, and the 70 thĪnniversary 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. 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. Virginia’s path to abolition of the death penalty was emblematic of capital punishment’s receding reach in the United States. 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.

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