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In 2025, the death penalty experienced a renaissance of sorts. There were forty-seven executions, the highest in over a decade. Capital punishment has expanded from one method of execution to four, adding firing squads, electrocution, and nitrogen hypoxia to lethal injection. And the political rhetoric calling for expansions of the death penalty, both in executive orders and public comments, is notable in both its intensity and frequency.
What is equally notable, however, is the scant number of new death sentences in 2025—twenty-three. Amidst all the executions and the bluster surrounding the death penalty, juries imposed only twenty-three death sentences in 2025. This continues a decade long trend. Indeed, juries have imposed less than three hundred death sentences in the past decade, and just over one hundred death sentences in the past five years.
In light of this changing landscape, this Article argues for a rethinking of the way to best pursue the abolition of the American death penalty. Specifically, it focuses on shifts in the past decade, and even the past year, to suggest a strategic path forward, with the overall conclusion that the death penalty remains an institution that is dying, albeit slowly, in the United States.
William W. Berry III *
* Associate Dean for Research and Montague Professor of Law, University of Mississippi. The Author thanks the University of Richmond Law Review for putting on an excellent symposium on the future of the death penalty in the fall 2025, and for their excellent work in bringing this Article to publication.