Florida pushed the nationwide tally for executions to its highest level in 15 years despite an ongoing decline in the use of capital punishment in the United States, according to a new report on 2025 death penalty statistics released Monday.
With falling public support for capital punishment, the majority of states no longer carry out executions. But among those that do, Florida was an outlier, accounting for 40 percent of all executions this year.
The dozen states that did hold executions put between one and five people to death, except for Florida, which executed 19 people, according to figures released in Monday’s reportfrom the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonpartisan research group that tracks data on capital punishment. That was the largest number since Texas put 24 people to death in 2009.
Florida is one of only two states that allow death sentences by nonunanimous juries and has strong supporters of capital punishment in both its legislative majority and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). DeSantis also has exclusive authority to set executions and deny clemency.
“Florida is an outlier in so many respects, mostly because it’s very unusual to have all of the power to select the people who will be executed and set their dates invested in one person,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the DPIC. “This is a government function that is funded by the taxpayers of Florida; democracies value transparency and accountability, but we don’t have that here.”
DeSantis’s office referred The Washington Post to a November news conferencewhere he addressed the question at length. DeSantis said the increase in executions wasn’t intentional but resulted from a backlog that existed when he took office and from delays during the coronavirus pandemic.
“My view is, it’s an appropriate punishment for the worst offenders,” DeSantis said at the Nov. 3 event. “We’ve heard from a lot of the family members of the victims over the years,” he added. “If you think about it, some of these crimes happened in the ’80s or ’90s. … There’s a saying that justice delayed is justice denied.”
Florida legislators passed several death penalty-related laws this year, including one that mandates a death sentence for any “unauthorized alien” convicted of a capital felony. Maher said some of those bills are “facially unconstitutional” — a federal court already blocked enforcementof the immigration-related bill — but their existence underscores the same national divide between most Republican elected officials and the majority of their constituents, Maher said.
Florida’s death penalty trends mirror the attitudes of President Donald Trump, who kicked off his second term by issuing an executive order that encouraged states to increase executions and death sentences. That support for the death penalty misreads where the public stands on the issue, especially as violent crime rates decline, Maher said, citing the report’s other findings.
Only 22 juries — fewer than half of those in capital cases — returned death sentences this year, the report said. Four decades ago, the number of juries voting for death sentences peaked at 325.
The decline in public support for the death penalty reached a five-decade low of 52 percent, according to an October Gallup poll. Attitudes on the moral acceptability of executions consistently vary widely across partisan lines, with Republicans supporting it at much higher rates than Democrats and independents. Maher said another notable gap is by age.
“We see some pretty impressive generational differences where younger people are more opposed to the death penalty,” Maher said. She noted that adults 18-34 support the death penalty at lower rates than any other age group.
This year, the death penalty continued to go unused in more than half the 27 states that still have the law. A Washington Post examination last year found that approximately 2,100 people were on death row. Many appeared likely to die there before they are executed.
The difficulty in obtaining lethal injection drugs over the past two decades has helped push some states to delay or halt executions, though 2025 also saw the expansion of nitrogen gas executions, a method developed and approved in a handful of states in response to drug scarcity.
In nitrogen executions, a prisoner is fitted with a mask that supplies pure nitrogen, depriving the body of oxygen. The method has been criticized as experimental. Media observers have noted that prisoners do not always lose consciousness quickly and have been observed thrashing and convulsing. Louisiana used the controversial method for the first time this year, while Alabama continued its use despite growing legal concerns.
The report found an “unusually high” number of veterans were executed this year, with seven of the 10 occurring in Florida. Among them was Jeffrey Hutchinson, a Gulf War veteran convicted of quadruple murder whose case drew the defense of more than 100 veterans who argued he was mentally broken by his time in combat.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied every request to stay executions that it received this year, including Hutchinson’s case.
In the coming years of the Trump presidency, Maher expects renewed scrutiny of the federal death penalty: Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to lift former president Joe Biden’s federal death penalty moratorium and has authorized several new death penalty prosecutions this year, including one against Luigi Mangione, the man accused in the 2024 killing of a UnitedHealthcare executive in New York.
Whether the government can persuade a jury to sentence Mangione and others to death is another question, Maher said.
“The messaging [Trump] puts out about the death penalty are really from a different era,” Maher said of Trump’s insistence that the death penalty improves public safety. “The death penalty is a political tool: it’s an easy answer to a lot of complicated questions.
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