North State Journal: “States and the federal government carried out 11 executions this year, the fewest since 1988, as support for the death penalty has continued to decline.
That’s according to an annual report on the death penalty released in mid-December. Three of the death sentences were carried out in January days before President Donald Trump left office. Annual executions have steadily declined since peaking at 98 in 1999.
Pandemic-related disruptions partly accounted for the low number of executions this year — though 2021 marked the seventh consecutive year when there were fewer than 30 executions and fewer than 50 new death sentences, the report said.
The federal death penalty was put on hold in June by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The report from the Death Penalty Information Center noted how some death-penalty states scrambled for alternative execution methods after pharmaceutical companies restricted access to drugs once widely used for lethal injections. It highlighted Arizona’s proposal this year to use cyanide hydrogen gas.
Support for the death penalty, meanwhile, has steadily declined from a high of 80% in 1994 to 54% this year, according to a 2021 Gallup poll cited in the report. Since the mid-1990s, opposition has risen from under 20% to around 45%.”