Capital punishment in the early 21st century

Despite the movement toward abolition, many countries have retained capital punishment, and, in fact, some have extended its scope. More than 30 countries have made the importation and possession for sale of certain drugs a capital offense. Iran, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines impose a mandatory death sentence for the possession of relatively small amounts of illegal drugs. In Singapore, which has by far the highest rate of execution per capita of any country, about three-fourths of persons executed in 2000 had been sentenced for drug offenses. Some 20 countries impose the death penalty for various economic crimes, including bribery and corruption of public officials, embezzlement of public funds, currency speculation, and the theft of large sums of money. Sexual offenses of various kinds are punishable by death in about two dozen countries, including most Islamic states. In the early 21st century there were more than 50 capital offenses in China.

Despite the large number of capital offenses in some countries, in most years only about 30 countries carry out executions. In the United States, where roughly 50 percent of the states and the federal government have officially retained the death penalty, about two-thirds of all executions since 1976 (when new death penalty laws were affirmed by the Supreme Court) have occurred in just six states—Texas, Virginia, Florida, Missouri, Louisiana, and Oklahoma (see capital punishment in the United States). China was believed to have executed about 1,000 people annually (no reliable statistics are published) until the first decade of the 21st century, when estimates of the number of deaths dropped sharply. Although the number of executions worldwide varies from year to year, some countries—including Belarus, Congo (Kinshasa), Iran, Jordan, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Yemen—execute criminals regularly. Japan and India also have retained the death penalty and carry out executions from time to time.

In only a few countries does the law allow for the execution of persons who were minors (under the age of 18) at the time they committed their crime. Most such executions, which are prohibited by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, have occurred in the United States, which has not ratified the convention and which ratified the covenant with reservations regarding the death penalty. Beginning in the late 1990s, there was considerable debate about whether the death penalty should be imposed on the mentally impaired; much of the controversy concerned practices in the United States, where more than a dozen such executions took place from 1990 to 2001 despite a UN injunction against the practice in 1989. In 2002 and 2005, respectively, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the execution of the mentally impaired and those under age 18 was unconstitutional, and in 2014 it held that states could not define such mental impairment as the possession of an IQ (intelligence quotient) score of 70 or below. The court banned the imposition of the death penalty for rape in 1977 and specifically for child rape in 2008.

In the late 1990s, following a series of cases in which persons convicted of capital crimes and awaiting execution on death row were exonerated on the basis of new evidence—including evidence based on new DNA-testing technology—some U.S. states began to consider moratoriums on the death penalty. In 2000 Illinois Gov. George Ryan ordered such a moratorium, noting that the state had executed 12 people from 1977 to 2000 but that the death sentences of 13 other people had been overturned in the same period. In 2003, on the eve of leaving office, Ryan emptied the state’s death row by pardoning 4 people and commuting the death sentences of 167 others. A number of states subsequently abolished capital punishment, including New Jersey (2007), Illinois (2011), Connecticut (2012), Washington (2018), and Virginia (2021). Further bolstering abolition efforts in the United States were the moratoriums imposed by the governors of Oregon (2011), Pennsylvania (2015), and California (2019).