In 2025, executions in the United States surged sharply, with 47 men put to death, marking the highest annual total in 16 years, the largest since 2009, and nearly double the number carried out in 2024.
Florida, Alabama, South Carolina, and Texas accounted for nearly three-quarters of the executions, while the number of states actively implementing capital punishment increased to 12, up from nine in 2024. Louisiana resumed executions after a 15-year hiatus, while South Carolina carried out the nation’s first firing-squad executions since 2010, using the method in three of its five killings. The Supreme Court denied all requests to stay executions throughout the year.
This spike in executions coincided with President Donald Trump’s executive order issued on his first day back in office, declaring capital punishment an essential tool for deterring and punishing heinous crimes. The order invoked the Founding Fathers’ support for the death penalty, framed it as a moral and legal necessity, and cited its ongoing popular support. Trump’s order strongly criticized politicians and judges who have opposed or obstructed executions, specifically condemning former President Joe Biden’s 2021 federal execution moratorium and his December 2024 commutation of 37 federal death-row prisoners, labeling these actions as a defiance of the law and an insult to victims of violent crime.
The executive order directed the attorney general to pursue the death penalty in all qualifying federal cases, emphasizing the murders of law enforcement officers and capital crimes committed by illegal immigrants. It also instructed federal authorities to encourage state prosecutors to pursue capital charges, ensure that states have access to lethal injection drugs, and review incarceration conditions for those whose sentences were previously commuted. Additionally, the order called for efforts to overturn Supreme Court precedents that restrict capital punishment.
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Following these directives, the Department of Justice authorized more than 20 new federal capital prosecutions in 2025, expanding the use of the death penalty at both the federal and state levels.
The horrific details of murders committed by those executed by the state are too numerous to mention. For a few salient examples, see here, here, and here.
Famed constitutional law and political philosophy professor Walter Berns wrote, “If human life is to be held in awe, the law forbidding the taking of it must be held in awe, and the only way the law can be made awe-inspiring is to entitle it to inflict the penalty of death.” He also stated, “There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly.”
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