The number of executions carried out in the United States after the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 reached 1,600 Thursday as Emmanuel Littlejohn and Alan Eugene Miller were killed in Oklahoma and Alabama. While Littlejohn was executed despite having been recommended for clemency, Miller died by the controversial method of nitrogen gas inhalation - only the second American to die this way and his second execution after a botched injection attempt in 2022.
After the turn of the century, the number of executions in the U.S. had continued to fall and hit a low in Covid year 2021 at just 11. Since then, executions have risen again. According to The Death Penalty Information Center, there were 18 in 2022, 24 in 2023 and with a quarter of the year still to go, 18 by the end of September 2024. This includes five executions carried out in the past 1.5 weeks, also in South Carolina, Texas and Missouri. Execution numbers would have been even lower in 2020 and 2021, had the federal government not resumed executions after a 17 years hiatus in 2020 under President Donald Trump. A total of 10 inmates died in 2020 and another three in January of 2021.
With a EU-wide decision not to export lethal drugs anymore in 2011 and Pfizer as the last FDA-approved company pulling its products from executions in 2016, states that carry out the death penalty have run into severe sourcing problems in past years, causing executions by injection to be postponed or not even scheduled. States have since scrambled to find alternative sources to start executions again - which led to some botched attempts using new drugs. Some states have also made alternative execution methods legal or entered them back into use, including the introduction of nitrogen gas in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma. Electrocution remains a legal capital punishment method in eight states and is now the default in South Carolina. In July, the state's Supreme Court ruled that both electrocution and the firing squad could be used as execution methods. Louisiana has also recently reintroduced the electric chair. Utah revived the firing squad in 2015 and Tennessee did in 2023.
Texas has carried out the most executions of any state with 590 since 1976 and 10 in the past two years. Second-ranked Oklahoma executed 126 since reinstatement and seven in 2023 and 2024, while Virginia killed 113 in total, but zero in the past two years. Other recently active states for the death penalty are Florida and Missouri, which have executed around 100 people each in the modern era.
