Opinion: It’s now clear that America’s death penalty is dying one generation at a time
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The Death Penalty Information Center’s recent annual report contained good news for those opposed to capital punishment. The number of new death sentences remained small by historical standards in 2024, at 26 nationwide, as did the number of executions, 25, and the number of people on death row, about 2,250. Public support for the death penalty, meanwhile, remained at a five-decade low, 53%.
But the report’s most important finding for the future of capital punishment concerns the stark generational differences of opinion on the death penalty. The center cited a recent Gallup poll illustrating 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 — favor the death penalty,” Gallup noted. “At the same time, roughly six in 10 adults in older generations are in favor of such laws. Two decades ago, there were no meaningful age differences in views of the death penalty.”
Support for capital punishment is declining from one generation to the next — from 62% among the so-called Silent Generation, people born before the end of World War II, to 42% in Gen Z, today’s youngest voters. This suggests the death penalty in the United States is dying one generation at a time.
Racism taints every stage of death penalty proceedings in California, as the state Supreme Court should acknowledge. It’s present in other criminal sentences as well.
This pattern has been widely noted and consistent for years. USA Today documented striking age-related differences in support for the death penalty more than a decade ago. A 2015 YouGov survey found that “young Americans are much more skeptical of the death penalty than their elders.”
What explains the capital punishment generation gap? For older generations, as University of Michigan law professors Samuel Gross and Pheobe Ellsworth noted in a 2001 paper, “Stories of grisly murders and the suffering families of the victims were more prevalent and more vividly described in the media than stories of unfair convictions.” But younger generations have grown up with more stories of arbitrariness, discrimination and error in America’s death penalty system.
Moreover, as fewer people are sentenced to death and executed each year — most of them in a shrinking number of states — the death penalty system looks ever more arbitrary and capricious.
Florida jurors and Oregon’s governor were unlikely heroes in the fight against executions last year. But elsewhere the death mill continues to grind.
This new script is exemplified by stories of death row inmates who have been freed by revelations of injustice and of others who were executed despite strong cases for exoneration. The Death Penalty Information Center noted the “significant media attention” surrounding “the milestone of 200 death row exonerations,” which the country reached in July when a California man was found to have been wrongfully convicted.
Younger generations’ exposure to America’s death penalty has come at a time when, as Gallup noted, “many states had moratoriums on the death penalty or repealed laws that allowed capital punishment … often motivated by cases in which death-row inmates were later found innocent.” That may explain why younger people, as the Death Penalty Information Center suggests, regard capital punishment as a “relic of another era.”
Writing about the way different generations come to see the world in different ways, the political theorist Michael Walzer has described what he calls a “gradual pedagogy” that is shaped and reshaped by experience. The reshaping of the way younger Americans think about capital punishment has led to a generational gap in attitudes that “has been widening every year for the past 20 years,” as the Death Penalty Information Center noted. This in itself may not bring the death penalty in the United States to an end in the near term, but it’s a reason to believe that it’s headed inexorably in that direction.
Austin Sarat is a professor of political science at Amherst College.
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