What is capital punishment? The death penalty, explained

Capital punishment, also called the death penalty, is the killing of a person by the state as punishment for a crime, after a court has convicted and sentenced them. The word comes from the Latin caput, head. Most countries have now abolished it in law or stopped using it, but a minority still carry out executions, most of them for murder, and some for drug offenses, terrorism or crimes against the state.

In short

• By the end of 2025, 145 countries had abolished the death penalty in law or in practice, according to Amnesty International; 113 of them for all crimes.
• Executions are concentrated in a few countries: Amnesty recorded at least 2,707 in 2025, about four in five of them in Iran, and the total leaves out China, where it believes thousands more took place.
• The arguments turn on justice, deterrence, the risk of executing the innocent, fairness in who is sentenced, and human rights.

This note explains the law and the arguments on each side; it takes no side and isn't legal advice.

Where did the death penalty come from?

For most of history, almost every legal system used it. The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, from around 1750 BCE, prescribed death for many crimes, and so did Roman, Chinese and medieval European law. In England by about 1800 more than 200 offenses, many of them thefts, could carry a death sentence, a body of law later nicknamed the Bloody Code.

The modern case against it began with the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria, whose On Crimes and Punishments of 1764 argued that a long prison term deters better than a quick death and that the state has no right to take life. In 1786 the Grand Duchy of Tuscany became the first modern state to abolish the death penalty, and Venezuela, in 1863, the first country to abolish it for all crimes. After the Second World War, abolition spread through Western Europe; Britain suspended it for murder in 1965, ended it for murder permanently in 1969 and abolished it for every crime in 1998. Protocols to the European Convention later banned it among Council of Europe members, and the UN adopted a treaty on abolition, the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, in 1989.

Where is capital punishment still used?

Amnesty International publishes the most widely cited count each year, built from official figures, court records, media reports and families. Its figures for 2025, published in May 2026, give this picture:

Measure, 2025	Amnesty's count
Countries abolitionist for all crimes	113
Countries abolitionist in law or practice	145
Recorded executions	At least 2,707, in 17 countries, up 78% from 1,518 in 2024
Highest recorded since	1981
China	Thousands believed executed; not counted, as figures are a state secret
Iran	At least 2,159
Saudi Arabia	At least 356
Yemen	At least 51
United States	47
New death sentences	At least 2,334, in 48 countries
People under sentence of death at year end	At least 25,508

Two things stand out. The practice is rare by country but concentrated: a handful of states account for nearly every execution. And the numbers are floors, not totals. Where governments hide executions, the true figures are unknown.

"Abolitionist in practice" is Amnesty's term for a country that keeps the death penalty in law but has executed no one for at least ten years and appears to have a policy of not doing so.

How does the death penalty work in the United States?

The United States runs the death penalty state by state, and in 2025 it carried out 47 executions, by Amnesty's count. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 27 states keep it in law and 23, plus the District of Columbia, have abolished it; in four of the 27, California, Ohio, Oregon and Pennsylvania, governors have halted executions. The federal government and the military also keep it.

The Supreme Court has shaped it more than any legislature. In Furman v. Georgia, in 1972, it struck down the death penalty as then applied, finding that it was imposed arbitrarily, in violation of the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. States rewrote their laws, and in Gregg v. Georgia, in 1976, the Court allowed executions to resume under new procedures: a separate sentencing phase, with factors that make a crime worse or more forgivable weighed before death can be imposed. Later decisions narrowed who can be executed. It is unconstitutional to execute people with intellectual disabilities (2002), people who were under 18 at the time of the crime (2005), or anyone for a crime against a person that did not take a life (2008).

What are the arguments for and against?

The debate is old, and serious people hold each side. The main arguments, in the form their defenders make them:

For	Against
Justice: some crimes are so grave that only death is a proportionate punishment, and victims' families are owed it	Irreversibility: courts make mistakes, and an execution can't be undone; in the US, at least 203 people sentenced to death since 1973 have later been exonerated, according to the Death Penalty Information Center
Deterrence: the threat of death may stop some would-be murderers	No clear deterrent: the evidence doesn't show executions reduce murder more than long imprisonment
Incapacitation: an executed person can never kill again, in prison or after escape	Unfairness: who is sentenced to death can depend on the race of the victim, the county and the quality of the defense lawyer
Democratic choice: where majorities support it, the law should reflect that	Human rights: the state should never kill a prisoner it already holds; [[what-is-the-united-nations

Still argued

Deterrence is where the evidence is most often claimed and least settled. In 2012 a committee of the US National Research Council reviewed three decades of studies and concluded that research to date "is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates", and recommended that such studies "not be used to inform deliberations" about the death penalty's effect on homicide, as its report states. That finding does not show the death penalty fails to deter; it shows the data can't answer the question, because executions are rare, murder has many causes and the right comparison, life imprisonment, is hard to separate. Supporters often rest the case on justice rather than deterrence, and opponents on wrongful convictions and rights, so the dispute is as much moral as empirical.

Why is it a human rights question?

Under international law, the death penalty is not banned outright. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights allows it, for "the most serious crimes" only, after a fair trial, never for crimes committed by people under 18, and never carried out on a pregnant woman. Countries that join its Second Optional Protocol promise to abolish it. Many governments that still use it argue that punishment is a question of national law and culture, while abolitionist states and groups treat it as a violation of the right to life set out in the 1948 Universal Declaration. The question sits at the meeting point of criminal law and human rights, and countries answer it differently.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: what does "abolitionist in practice" mean, and why do Amnesty's execution counts understate the real number?
• What did Furman v. Georgia decide in 1972, and what changed in 1976?
• Why did the National Research Council say the deterrence studies couldn't settle the question?

Sources

• Death penalty in 2025: facts and figures — Amnesty International, 2026
• Death sentences and executions 2025 — Amnesty International, 2026
• Deterrence and the Death Penalty, summary — National Research Council, 2012
• State by state — Death Penalty Information Center
• Capital punishment — Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
• Capital punishment — Wikipedia