Use Of Death Penalty Continues Its Decline In The United States

By Eyder Peralta / NPR

Published December 16, 2015 at 4:40 AM PST

This story was published more than 8 years ago.

The death chamber of the lethal injection facility at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, Calif.

The death penalty is in decline no matter the measure, a new study released by the Death Penalty Information Center has found.

The report found that 28 people were executed this year, the lowest since 1991. The number of death sentences dropped by 33 percent.

Only six states executed convicts during the year and Texas, Missouri and Georgia accounted 86 percent of them.

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The death penalty started falling out of favor in the 1990s. This past decade is now comparable to the one that preceded a 1972 Supreme Court decision that put capital punishment on hold.

"The use of the death penalty is becoming increasingly rare and increasingly isolated in the United States," Robert Dunham, DPIC's executive director, said in a statement. "These are not just annual blips in statistics, but reflect a broad change in attitudes about capital punishment across the country."

To that point, the decline also coincides with a shift in public opinion.

If you look at Gallup's historical data, 80 percent of Americans said they supported the death penalty in 1994. That number declined to 61 percent in Gallup's last poll in October of 2015.