Enthusiasm for the death penalty continued to ebb in the United States during 2010. As Christmas approaches — a season of quiet in America's execution chambers, as death takes a holiday — there have been 46 inmates executed, down from 52 in 2009.
That's fewer than half the number put to death in the peak year of 1999, when 98 prisoners walked the last mile. Meanwhile, the number of new death sentences imposed in 2010 remained near the lowest level in 35 years.
Statistics collected by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) show that use of the death penalty was down across the country — even in Texas, which has carried out more than a third of all U.S. executions since the modern death penalty was instituted in 1976. Seventeen Texas inmates were executed in 2010, matching the lowest number in a year since 1996, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. That's a reduction of nearly 60% compared to the busiest year for the Texas executioner, when 40 inmates were put to death in 2000.
Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the decline in the use of the death penalty than the fact that no death sentences — zero — were imposed by Virginia's courts in 2010. The commonwealth is a bastion of capital punishment, second only to Texas in the frequency of executions. Missouri, which ranks fifth in the number of executions in the modern era, also sent no new inmates to death row.