Within the next four weeks, there are eight scheduled executions in the U.S.
This follows 13 executions in the U.S. earlier in 2024, with three more scheduled for November and December. If all these executions are carried out, nine states across the U.S. are on track to put to death 24 people this year, potentially matching last year’s concerning total.
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These yearly figures, while historically low, are the highest since 2018; and continue the upward trend seen since 2021, when we recorded the lowest number of executions in more than 30 years. The states scheduled to execute people over the remainder of 2024 are Alabama (3), Texas (3), Oklahoma (1), Missouri (2), Indiana (1), and South Carolina (1).
Unless the courts or governors intervene, six states are set to carry out 11 executions before the end of the year – five of those executions will take place over a seven-day period starting on September 20th.
The scheduling of so many executions is disheartening in and of itself, but even more disturbing are the efforts that each state is putting in to plow forward to execute people no matter what, prioritizing their machineries of death over taking steps towards dismantling them:
- After the state fought legal challenges and the South Carolina Supreme Court decided that the state’s three execution methods (lethal injection, firing squad, electric chair) are not considered “cruel and unusual punishment” under the U.S. Constitution, South Carolina is set to carry out its first execution in 13 years.
- Oklahoma authorities are set to execute an individual despite the state’s Pardon and Parole Board recommendation to the Governor that he receive clemency.
- Missouri’s Attorney General is intent on executing Marcellus Williams despite the local prosecutor’s attempts to vacate the original conviction due to concerns of racial discrimination and unreliable evidence.
- The authorities of Texas consistently execute more people in any year than any other state and have a shocking number of executions – three – set in a month. One set on the same day as Marcellus Williams in Missouri on September 24.
- And, in Alabama, the state is poised to move forward with its second nitrogen hypoxia execution, despite condemnation by United Nations independent experts on the use of this particularly cruel method of execution earlier this year. The UN experts called for a ban of the method and labeled it “human experimentation” that “amounted to torture,” after it took Kenneth Smith more than 20 minutes to die and witnesses described him being “conscious for several minutes as he writhed and convulsed on the gurney, gasping for air and pulling on the restraints, shaking violently in prolonged agony.” There is no humane way to kill.
If all these executions move forward as scheduled, the very last in Oklahoma on September 26 will become the 1600th execution conducted in the U.S. since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153. Let that sink in for a moment – sixteen hundred executions in less than 50 years.
Amnesty International USA supports efforts to stop the remaining scheduled executions in 2024.
A violation of the human right to life
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases. The reason is simple. We believe that the death penalty is not only the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment, it is also a violation of the right to life as recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The death penalty is too flawed to fix. All executions, no matter the method, are a violation of human rights, and states should move towards abolishing the death penalty instead of using resources to dream up and implement cruel ways of killing somebody.
The United States is an outlier
Close to three quarters of the countries in the world have now abolished the death penalty in law or practice. The U.S. should be on this list. Instead, it keeps company with an increasingly isolated group of countries including China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and others that use the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. In fact, in 2023, after the above four countries, the U.S. was the fifth country in the world when it comes to highest number of known executions. What’s more, for 15 consecutive years, Amnesty International has denounced that the U.S has been the only country in the Americas to execute people, defying the progress towards a largely death penalty-free region. While the governments of some countries in the region have continued to sentence people to death, they have not carried out any executions.
While most of the world has moved away from the death penalty, a minority of U.S. states, as well as the federal government, have continued to pursue this practice, a continuing stain on the country’s human rights record.
The national trend reflects the state of the death penalty at global level. Despite continued use of the death penalty in numerous states, 23 states and Washington D.C. have abolished it completely and there have been efforts to repeal this cruel punishment in additional states. In 2023, bills to end the death penalty were introduced in the U.S. Congress and legislative assemblies of states including Arizona, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and South Carolina.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, however, initiatives in a minority of states were introduced in support of continuing this unhuman practice. For example:
- Bills to carry out executions by firing squad were introduced in Idaho and Tennessee,
- Montana considered a bill to expand the substances that can be used in lethal injection protocol,
- A new law in South Carolina conceals the identity of people or entities involved in the preparation or carrying out of executions,
- A new law in Florida allows death sentences to be imposed when at least eight jurors vote in favor — making it the state with the lowest minimum voting required by juries to impose death sentences, and,
- In July, Alabama resumed executions by lethal injection after Governor Kay Ivey lifted the short moratorium she had imposed in November 2022 after two botched execution attempts.
Earlier in 2024, Alabama became the first (and so far, only) state in the U.S. to put somebody to death using the untested nitrogen oxide method. At the time, Amnesty International USA echoed the alarm raised by the UN experts in response to this new, untested method. When Alabama killed Kenneth Smith using this method, we raised our concerns, saying:
“The death penalty is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment and accounts of Kenneth Smith’s last moments simply show that there is no humane way to take someone’s life. It is high time for those in power to stop trying to fix the failed experiment that is the death penalty. Instead, they should devote all resources and focus on alternatives that would more effectively address crime at its roots and protect human rights. We call on the Alabama authorities to immediately establish a moratorium on all executions as a first critical step towards abolition.”
In short, the best and only solution to concerns about lethal injection or any other method of carrying out executions is to abolish the practice in its entirety.
Racism and the death penalty
For years, Amnesty International has advocated on behalf of a man on death row in Alabama, Rocky Myers. Myers, a Black man, was sentenced to life without parole by a nearly all-white jury in 1994. The trial judge overrode the jury’s decision and imposed a death sentence via a practice called judicial override – now outlawed in Alabama.
Rocky Myers is only one of the many people who has been treated more harshly by the justice system simply because of his race. In the U.S., the horrible truth is that race is a major predictor of who will be given a death sentence. Black defendants are 7.5 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than white defendants.
Earlier this year, Amnesty International delivered thousands of petitions to Alabama Governor Kay Ivey asking her to grant clemency to Rocky Myers.
“With a swipe of her pen, Governor Ivey can end the injustice that has tarnished Rocky Myers’ case for three decades,” said Amnesty International’s Alabama State Death Penalty Abolition Coordinator TJ Riggs. “The death penalty is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment, and, pending abolition, we urge her to halt all executions in the state and conduct a review of Rocky’s case as well as others on death row who were sentenced under judicial override.”
Tell Governor Ivey to commute Rocky Myers’ death sentence.
U.S. must abolish the death penalty
No government should give itself the power to execute people. It is past time for the U.S. to come into line with the majority of other countries who have made the decision to no longer carry out this cruel and inhuman punishment.
In addition to passing state and federal legislation abolishing the practice, the U.S. must withdraw its reservations to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and finally become party to the international treaties – including the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights to Abolish the Death Penalty — which both provide for the abolition of the death penalty.
Change is possible! When Amnesty International started its work in 1977, only 16 countries had totally abolished the death penalty. At the end of 2023, 112 countries were fully abolitionist and 144 in total had abolished the death penalty in law or practice.