Gov't Executions - The Company We Keep

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

I'm looking forward to watching the new opera, "Dead Man Walking." I'm not a proponent of capital punishment and was looking at some current statistics ahead of time. I want to share some of what I found.

As of late 2022, 53 countries retain capital punishment, 111 countries have completely abolished it, seven have abolished it for domestic crimes while maintaining it for special circumstances such as war crimes, and 24 are abolitionist in practice. There are 193 countries in the world. That means capital punishment isn't practiced in 70% of all the countries in the world.

But more shockingly, look at the company we keep in terms of the frequency of executions. China is the big outlier executing thousands of citizens per year. We were the fifth most active in the world last year, and look - There is not another primarily "Christian" state among the top ten or beyond. In the USA, capital punishment was used by 6 of 50 states in 2022: Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Isn't it ironic that states where the people trust governments the least have the most government executions?

Popularity for the death penalty is highest among white Evangelical Protestants (53%) and Protestants in general (50%). Government executions, as reported by Amnesty International, took place in 20 of the world's 195 countries last year.