Texas no longer national leader in executions

Texas no longer is the national capital of capital punishment, but it still is among the handful of states responsible for about three-fourths of the executions carried out in 2025, a report from the Death Penalty Information Center revealed.

With 18 executions carried out this year and another scheduled this week, Florida was responsible for more than one-third of the executions nationwide, according to the center’s report, “The Death Penalty in 2025: Year End Report.”

Florida, Alabama, South Carolina and Texas combined accounted for 72 percent of all executions in the United States in 2025, the report noted.

The Death Penalty Information Center reported 46 prisoners executed in 11 states in 2025, with two more scheduled: Stacey Humphreys in Georgia on Dec. 17 and Frank Athen Walls in Florida the following day.

“The increase in this year’s execution numbers was caused by the outlier state of Florida, where the governor set a record number of executions,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

“The data show that the decisions of Gov. DeSantis and other elected officials are increasingly at odds with the decisions of American juries and the opinions of the American public.”

The center reported public support for capital punishment at the national level is at its lowest point in five decades at 52 percent. Polls also show generational differences, with a majority of people younger than 55 disapproving of the death penalty.

Texas put five prisoners to death in 2025

Texas executed five Death Row prisoners in 2025: Steven Nelson, Richard Tabler, Moises Sandoval Mendoza, Matthew Johnson and Blaine Keith Milam.

Two other men—David Wood and Robert Roberson—were scheduled to be put to death but received stay of execution orders from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

The Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty also issued its annual report, “Texas Death Penalty Developments in 2025: The Year in Review,” on Dec. 15.

“After decades as the nation’s death penalty pariah, Texas was not the lead executioner this year. … Yet the state continues to waste millions of taxpayer dollars in the pursuit of capital punishment while glaring problems with its application persist,” the report states.

This year, Texas judges set the fewest execution dates in at least 30 years, and prosecutors increasingly waived the death penalty in capital murder trials due to costs and the lengthy and uncertain legal process, the coalition reports.

Embracing ‘mercy and reverence for human life’

John Litzler, public policy director for Texas Baptists’ Christian Life Commission, said he was encouraged by “what appear to be declines across the board of both executions and new death penalty sentences in Texas.”

“The history of capital punishment in Texas is fraught with prejudice, disproportionality and error,” Litzler said. “For that reason, the reduction of capital punishment sentences carried out in Texas shouldn’t be viewed as a rejection of justice, but a state that embraces both mercy and reverence for human life.

“As Texas Baptists continue to share their beliefs that all human life is sacred because every person is made in the image of God, I expect the number of executions in our state to continue to decrease. That’s because living in a community and state that values human life compels us to approach potential death sentences with humility and restraint.

“This is reflected in the practices of our district attorneys who are seeking the death penalty as a punishment less often and also in the decisions of our juries who are more often choosing life without parole as a criminal sentence, even with capital punishment as an option.”

This year, prosecutors in only two Texas counties pursued death sentences, the coalition report notes.

“In Texas, whether a person receives a death sentence continues to be driven not by the underlying crime, but by geography,” the report states. “Only prosecutors in Harris and Tarrant counties pursued new death sentences in 2025, with juries sending three men to death row while rejecting the death penalty in a fourth case.”

‘Past time to kill the death penalty’

Death sentences in Texas have fallen from 48 in 1999 to single digits each of the past 11 years, the report notes.

The coalition report urges policy makers “to examine the collective costs of capital punishment and to follow the lead of Texans who are increasingly abandoning the death penalty as a path to justice.”

“It is well past time to kill the death penalty,” said Stephen Reeves, executive director of FaithWorks, formerly known as Fellowship Southwest. “While the decrease in executions and new sentences in Texas is encouraging, it only highlights the arbitrary and capricious nature of the punishment.

 “Even seldom and random state vengeance carried out on the poor, unlucky, marginalized and forgotten members of society does nothing to make us safer and is simply cruel and unjust. Let’s finally abolish the death penalty and get Texas out of the ineffective, expensive and immoral business of killing our citizens.”

Nan Tolson, director of Texas Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, called the death penalty, “a wasteful and expensive system with life or death consequences.”

Costs involved in carrying out an execution—including investigations, trials, appeals, prolonged incarceration and the execution itself—make the death penalty two to three times more expensive than a sentence of life without parole, said Tolson, a Baylor University graduate.

“Texas should embrace a vision of justice that leaves the death penalty behind and reallocates limited public resources to measures proven to improve public safety,” she said.

Texas policymakers need to “examine the collective costs of capital punishment”—including the moral cost of people being executed for crimes they did not commit, she added.

“As conservatives, we don’t trust the government to deliver our mail on time, much less get convictions right all the time in death penalty cases,” Tolson said.