You live in a state that has capital punishment, but you haven’t recently heard of anyone being executed and you started to wonder which are states with death penalty and that use it the most? Maybe you know that out of 50 states in America, in 32 of them death penalty exists, and the other 18 are the non-death penalty states. But as you’ve naturally concluded, just because capital punishment exists in some state that doesn’t mean that it is often exercised. There’s got to be a damn good reason for carrying out an execution; crimes that are paid for with lethal punishment vary from state to state, and methods of execution, too, but in the United States these crimes are usually the ones that involve a murder or multiple murders. There were only a few cases where people were sentenced to death penalty for crimes that didn’t involve murder at all.
The question poses itself – why do some states use the death penalty more than others? Is this just the question of the number of atrocities committed in that states? It’s kind of hard to think of these states as the ones that simply have many more heinous crimes; we believe something else must be carrying the answer… perhaps the legal system? It is only natural to assume that there exist some important differences in the legal and cultural aspects between states that very rarely use the death penalty and states that use it the most. If it were only the question of crimes, then these states would be considered as the least safe, despite the existence of this capital punishment. Having this in mind, we can raise a million ethical questions about the death penalty in general; not to mention the chance of convicting an innocent person and sentencing them to a punishment that is irreversible (mistakes have been known to happen, as you can see from our list of 10 Longest Prison Sentences Served by an Innocent Man.
For creating our list of 10 states with death penalty and that use it the most, we have used statistical data taken from the Death Penalty Information Center. To go further in depth about the reasons responsible for these data, we would have to analyze many cultural and legal aspects within these states, which is beyond the scope of this article. Before we proceed with our list, we will also provide you with information about countries that have executed the most in 2013, just so you can compare the United States with them:
5. United States – around 40;
4. Saudi Arabia – around 80;
3. Iraq – around 70;
2. Iran – around 370;
1. China – thousands.
This data is just for the year 2013, but the years before have shown similar statistics and rankings, and as you can see – the United States are in 5th place. Now that we have seen how often this penalty is used in other countries in the world, we can continue with our list that we’ll show us how states in America rank among themselves in this category. Notice that our ranking is formed by statistic data that shows the number of executions from 2010 to April 2015, but we will also provide you with information about the total number of known execution by state. So, 10 states with death penalty and that use it the most currently are:
10. Virginia
Number of executions from 2010 to April 2015: 5;
Total number of known executions: 110.
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