On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump issued a swath of executive orders, with one regarding the federal death penalty. Titled "Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety," the order reiterated the constitutionality of the federal death penalty, and directed the attorney general to seek capital punishment where applicable. This applicability includes those who kill police officers and those found guilty of murder who were not in the country legally.
While the federal courts have been instructed to pursue the death penalty, 2024 saw the resumption of death penalty practices in some states. According to Catholic Mobilizing Network, an advocacy group that opposes capital punishment, there were 25 state executions carried out in 2024. This is one more than in the previous year, with sentences carried out in nine states, whereas 2023 only saw five states carry out executions.
In 2024, Alabama was the state to carry out the most executions (6), followed by Texas (5), Oklahoma (4) and Missouri (4).
It is the first year in the nation’s history that Alabama executed more people than any other state. Furthermore, Indiana and Arizona resumed death penalty practices for the first time in years. The prior carried out its first execution in 15 years, during 2024, while the latter announced the resumption of executions in 2025.
On the federal side, the new directive is unlikely to lead to any executions in 2025, as outgoing President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 convicts on death row, to life without the possibility of parole. The remaining three are in the midst of appeals that are expected to take years to complete. It does mean, however, that anyone federally convicted of a capital crime could find themselves on death row moving forward.
No sense
Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, Executive Director of Catholic Mobilizing Network, commented that the executive order issued by Trump “makes no sense.”:
“What we know about the death penalty is that it does not deter crime or make communities safer. It’s immoral, flawed and risky, arbitrary and unfair, cruel and dehumanizing. Both the state and federal death penalty systems are broken beyond repair, and emblematic of a throwaway culture.”
As the Catholic Mobilizing Network bases its work on Church teaching, she turned to the Catechism to explain why the organization opposes the death penalty:
“The Catechism of the Catholic Church states unequivocally that “the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person’" (2267).
Organizations opposing the death penalty are also finding more support from the general public, as US support for capital punishment is currently at its lowest in 50 years.
Support is found in only a slight majority of US citizens (53%), but more than half of those aged 18 to 43 voiced their opposition to the death penalty in a Gallup survey.
The findings also noted that those who attend Mass weekly were as much as 30% more likely to oppose the death penalty than those who rarely or never go to Mass.
Visit Catholic Mobilizing Network to learn more about the group's efforts to end the death penalty in the US, as well as other initiatives the organization is launching for the 2025 Year of Jubilee.
