US executions have surged in 2025 to the highest level in 16 years, as Donald Trump’s campaign to reinvigorate judicial killings, combined with the US Supreme Court’s increasing refusal to engage in last-minute pleas for reprieve, has taken a heavy toll.
A total of 47 men – they were all male – have been killed by states operating the death penalty in the course of the year. That was almost double the number in 2024, amounting to the greatest frenzy of capital punishment bloodletting in the US since 2009.
The jump in the practice of state killing will further separate the US from almost all other developed countries. Only Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan have staged executions in recent years.
The increase in the US is all the more pronounced given the gradual decline in capital punishment that had been the prevailing wind in the US for most of the past two decades. It stands starkly discordant with the trend in public opinion.
Gallup, which has been taking the pulse of the American public’s views on the death penalty since 1937, found that this year 52% supported it for people convicted of murder – a 50-year low. Most Americans under age 55 now oppose the practice.
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Executions in several countries that retain the death penalty surged in 2025, despite abolition campaigns gaining momentum worldwide.
An Iranian nonprofit estimated that Iran executed at least 1,500 people in the first 11 months of the year — more than double the number the year before — while Saudi Arabia’s 356 executions were the highest on record.
Figures are unavailable for China, which keeps most executions secret but is widely believed to be the world’s leading executioner.
Globally, the practice is falling out of favor: The UN says 170 states have stopped using it.
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