This is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Sign up for future newsletters.
In Joe Biden’s final days as president, he landed a quiet political blow against Donald Trump by commuting the sentences of dozens of men on federal death row. Trump had said he wanted to carry out as many executions as possible; Biden deprived him of the chance.
So it is all the more surprising that Trump’s first year in office is seeing a noticeable surge in executions nationwide. Ten states have executed 30 people since January, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. That’s already the highest annual total in more than a decade, with 13 more executions planned through December.
What explains the rise? Probably not public support. Recent polls show around half of Americans favor executions, but the best evidence of what people really think is found in courtrooms, where jurors have increasingly rejected the punishment. Across the country, juries have sent 10 people to death row this year, compared with a high of 315 in all of 1996.
It’s prisoners like those, from a generation ago, who are now facing execution. Calls to experts on the death penalty led me to four interconnected theories to explain the rise in executions this year.
1. The Trump Effect
Trump wants to refill federal death row: Last month, the president vowed to execute everyone who commits murder in Washington, D.C.. His attorney general, Pam Bondi, has pledged to seek the punishment more often in federal cases nationwide, including for famous defendants like Luigi Mangione.
It’s too soon to tell if his administration will deliver on these promises. But legal experts say some state attorneys general and governors might be revving up their execution chambers to align themselves with the president’s priorities, in a bid for his and his supporters’ favor.
“It only takes one Trump-aligned leader in a state to restart executions of people who have been on death row for years,” said Laura Porter, executive director of the 8th Amendment Project, which seeks to repeal the punishment.
In the last few years, attorneys general Todd Rokita of Indiana, Liz Murrill of Louisiana, and Derek Brown of Utah have all been key figures in pushing a return to executions in their states after long pauses. None of them responded to a request for comment.
But one state leader is in a category all his own.
2. The DeSantis Effect
In Florida, the governor signs death warrants, and this year Gov. Ron DeSantis has overseen 11 executions — more than a third of the national total, and more than any year in Florida since 1936. In the last few years, DeSantis also promoted new laws seeking to expand the death penalty, to allow it in cases of people who sexually assault children, for instance.
DeSantis began focusing on the death penalty more when he first started running for president in 2023, at a moment of escalating rhetoric on the subject from other candidates. He is widely expected to run again in 2028, and has been aligning himself with Trump by making Florida a center of immigration detention.
DeSantis’s office did not respond to a request for comment. If he is trying to curry favor with voters for higher office, his actions would fit a long, bipartisan history. In 1992, then-Gov. Bill Clinton flew home to Arkansas from the presidential campaign trail to oversee an execution.
But in the past, such efforts by governors have often run into a barrier, which has recently evaporated.
3. The Supreme Court Effect
The vast majority of death row prisoners ask the Supreme Court to stop their executions. They usually fail. This was true even before Trump appointed three justices in his first term, all of whom have, unsurprisingly, shown little sympathy towards death row prisoners.
But when the first Trump administration pursued 13 executions in its final months, a new dynamic emerged: Lower courts halted some executions — only for the Supreme Court to step in and let them proceed.
These decisions were a signal to state leaders, suggesting that if they pursued more executions, the court would not stand in their way, according to Ngozi Ndulue, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law. “The Trump execution spree paved the way for what we’re seeing now,” she said.
The Supreme Court has also, in recent years, cleared away one more barrier to executions.
4. The Methods
A decade ago, the Supreme Court made it more difficult for death row prisoners to challenge methods of execution, in the case of Glossip v. Gross. This paved the way for states to develop nitrogen gas chambers (Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas) and firing squads (South Carolina, Utah and Idaho).
The president himself has reportedly talked in the past about his support for firing squads, hangings and the guillotine. Such comments help explain what state leaders and Trump himself may be going for with these methods. “We’re in an age of spectacle, and the death penalty has always been a spectacle,” said Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, a professor at Brooklyn Law School.
At the same time, lethal injection remains the dominant method across the country. Prison officials once struggled to secure drugs, because large pharmaceutical companies refused to sell them. State lawmakers solved this problem by passing bills to make the purchasing process more secretive, hoping to entice smaller pharmacies to get involved.
Success has not come cheap. Indiana carried out two executions since last December, ending a 15-year pause. The Indiana Capital Chronicle recently sued the Department of Correction for public records, learning the state paid more than a million dollars to purchase enough drugs for four lethal injections. Two doses expired before they could be used. Another execution is planned for October, even as Gov. Mike Braun has said he’d consider arguments for ending the death penalty.
