Which States Have the Death Penalty?

In March 2025, three state corrections department volunteers armed with rifles lifted their weapons and fired at Brad Sigmon, who sat in a metal chair 15 feet away inside the Broad River Correctional Institution in South Carolina. 

Sigmon—convicted of the brutal 2001 murder of his girlfriend’s parents—was the first U.S. prisoner to be executed by firing squad in 15 years. He chose that method of execution over lethal injection or the electric chair, which he feared would “cook him alive.”

Since 1976, only seven prisoners have been executed by firing squad in the United States. Sigmon’s death, which was covered extensively by the media, reignited a debate over capital punishment.

The death penalty has been used for millennia; it was included in the Code of Hammurabi, the collection of laws set forth around 1754 B.C. by the Babylonian king Hammurabi. The Old Testament of the Bible states that the death penalty was an appropriate punishment for crimes such as adultery, murder or assaulting a parent.

But capital punishment wasn’t universally condoned; William the Conqueror disallowed execution for any crime except during wartime. His leniency didn’t last long, and during the reign of King Henry VIII, as many as 72,000 are believed to have been executed by methods such as being burned at the stake, drawn and quartered, beheaded, hanged or boiled to death. 

The first known execution to take place in America occurred in 1608, when Captain George Kendall of the Jamestown colony was killed by firing squad for being a spy. Other American colonies allowed the death penalty, even for petty offenses such as stealing grapes or killing someone’s chick­ens.

Between Captain Kendall’s death in 1608 and 2002, an estimated 15,269 people have died in the United States by capital punishment. In 1847, Michigan became the first government in the English-speaking world to entirely abolish the death penalty for any crime except treason, followed by Wisconsin in 1853 and Maine in 1887.

In the 1972 case of Furman v. Georgia, which consolidated several capital-punishment cases, the Supreme Court struck down the death sentence in each of the cases, though for different reasons. Some justices emphasized the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on “cruel and unusual punishments”; others noted the likelihood of racial discrimination in cases of capital crimes.

In 1976, the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in the landmark case Gregg v. Georgia, in which the court upheld the Georgia procedure that separated the sentencing phase of a trial from the phase that determined a defendant’s guilt or innocence. The following year, convicted murderer Gary Gilmore was executed by a Utah firing squad.

The use of capital punishment increased significantly in the years following the Gregg v. Georgia decision, even as other developed nations banned the practice. The last execution in European Union nations, for example, occurred in France in 1977 when convicted murderer Hamida Djandoubi was beheaded by guillotine.

The following 27 U.S. states allow capital punishment: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming. However, there is a pause on executions in California, Ohio, Oregon and Pennsylvania due to executive action.

These 23 states, as well as Washington, D.C., have banned the death penalty: Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

Four states—California, Ohio, Oregon and Pennsylvania—have had a moratorium placed on the death penalty by their governors. The U.S. government has also declared a moratorium on capital punishment in federal cases, although the U.S. military is still permitted to execute prisoners. Still, a military execution has not taken place since 1961.

Of the four people currently on military death row, the latest to be sentenced to death was Nidal Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.