The latest report from the Death Penalty Information Center Annual report contained good news for those who opposed the death penalty. The number of new death sentences in 2024 remained low by historical standards, at 26 nationwide, as did the number of executions (25) and the number of people on death row (around 2,250). Meanwhile, public support for the death penalty remained at 53%, its lowest level in five decades.
However, the report's most important finding for the future of the death penalty concerns the stark differences in opinion between generations about the death penalty. The center cited a current Gallup poll This shows that the way people think about death sentences now depends heavily on their age.
“Less than half of U.S. adults born after 1980 – those in the Millennial and Generation Z birth cohorts – support the death penalty,” Gallup noted. “At the same time, around six in ten adults in the older generation support such laws. Two decades ago there were no significant age differences in attitudes toward the death penalty.”
Support for the death penalty declines from generation to generation – from 62% among the so-called Silent Generation, people born before the end of World War II, to 42% among Generation Z, today's youngest voters. This suggests that the death penalty in the United States is being phased out generation by generation.
This pattern has been well known and consistent for years. USA today documents striking age-related differences I spoke out in favor of the death penalty more than a decade ago. A YouGov poll from 2015 found that “young Americans are much more skeptical of the death penalty as their elders.”
What explains the death penalty generational gap? For older generations, like University of Michigan law professors Samuel Gross and Pheobe Ellsworth noted A 2001 article said: “Stories of gruesome murders and the victims' suffering families have been featured more frequently and graphically in the media than stories of wrongful convictions.” But younger generations are more exposed to stories of arbitrariness, discrimination and mistakes grew up in the American death penalty system.
Additionally, because fewer and fewer people are sentenced to death and executed each year—most of them in a shrinking number of states—the death penalty system remains in place seems increasingly arbitrary and capricious.
This new script is illustrated by stories from death row inmates liberated by revelations of injustice and from others who were executed despite convincing reasons for exoneration. The Death Penalty Information Center noted the “significant media attention” surrounding “the milestone of 200 releases from death row” that the country reached in July when it was determined that a California man had been wrongfully convicted.
Younger generations are being exposed to America's death penalty at a time when, as Gallup noted, “many states had moratoriums on the death penalty or repealed laws that permitted capital punishment…often motivated by cases in which death row inmates were later found innocent.” .” That may explain why, as the Death Penalty Information Center suggests, younger people view the death penalty as “a relic of another time.”
Political theorist Michael Walzer writes about the way different generations see the world in different ways described what he calls a “gradual pedagogy” that is shaped and reshaped by experience. Reshaping the way younger Americans think about the death penalty has led to a generational gap in attitudes that has “widened every year for 20 years,” as the Death Penalty Information Center found. This alone may not result in the abolition of the death penalty in the United States in the short term, but there is reason to believe that it is moving inexorably in that direction.
Austin Sarat is a professor of political science at Amherst College.