Capital Punishment

The first recorded execution on American soil was of Captain George Kendall, put to death in 1608 by firing squad. Since that time, there have been more than 15,000 known executions. About one‐third of executions in the United States have occurred since 1930. Figure 1 shows the number of executions that have taken place in the US from 1930 until the end of 2003. One important thing to note in this figure is that the frequency with which the death penalty has been used has varied substantially over time. There were between 150 and 200 executions per year in the US during the 1930s, but then there occurred a long‐term decline. There were no executions at all during the ten‐year period from 1967 to 1977 because state and federal courts were deciding whether the death penalty was constitutional. After 1976 there was a fairly consistent but slow increase in the number of executions up to a peak of 98 executions in 1999. There are two points to keep in mind about this, however. First, although the frequency of the death penalty has increased since 1976, the number of executions is nowhere near what it had been from the 1930s to the 1950s. Second, although the frequency of the use of the death penalty had begun an upward trend in 1976, the peak of this increase occurred in 1999. From 1999 to 2003 there has been another decline in the frequency of executions, with only 65 occurring in 2003.