US executions surged in 2025 to highest level in 16 years
source: The Guardian
published: 31 December 2025
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US executions have surged in 2025 to the highest level in 16 years, as Donald Trump's campaign to reinvigorate judicial killings, combined with the US supreme court’s increasing refusal to engage in last-minute pleas for reprieve, have taken a heavy toll.
A total of 47 men – they were all male – have been killed by states operating the death penalty in the course of the year. That was almost double the number in 2024, amounting to the greatest frenzy of capital punishment bloodletting in the US since 2009.
The dramatic jump in the practice of state killing will further separate the US from almost all other developed countries. Only Japan, Singapore and Taiwan have staged executions in recent years.
The increase in the US is all the more pronounced given the gradual decline in capital punishment that had been the prevailing wind in the US for most of the past two decades. It stands starkly discordant with the trend in public opinion.
Gallup, which has been taking the pulse of the American public’s views on the death penalty since 1937, found that this year 52% supported it for people convicted of murder – a 50-year low.
Most Americans under age 55 now oppose the practice.
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