DP3 Study: After 1,600 Executions, the Public and Police are Safer in States with No Death Penalty
If capital punishment serves a public safety purpose, having and using the death penalty should, over time, reduce a state’s murder rates. Or so the theory goes. Now, fifty-two years and 1,600 executions since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all existing death penalty laws and told the states to start over, we have a clear answer. It doesn’t.
A new study of more than three decades of FBI homicide data by the Death Penalty Policy Project has found that, after 1,600 executions, the public and police are actually safer in states that don’t have or have recently abolished the death penalty. And, among the death penalty states, the public and police are safer in states that currently have official moratoria on executions or have rarely executed anyone.
Moreover, the states that are now most actively carrying out executions are among the least safe for the public and the most dangerous for police. They have failed to execute their way into violence prevention. From a public safety perspective, the death penalty has been a pointless exercise in cruelty.
I. The Homicide Study
Death penalty proponents have long claimed, without supporting evidence, that the death penalty is a deterrent to crime that makes the public and police safer. They also often have uncritically asserted that abolition of capital punishment would set loose a “parade of horribles,” increasing murder rates generally and declaring “open season” on police officers.
To test these hypotheses, the Death Penalty Policy Project homicide study examined murder rates and killings of law enforcement personnel across the country from 1987 (the earliest year for which FBI Uniform Crime Statistics on officers feloniously killed in the line of duty were available) through 2019.1 We created five comparison groups to analyze the impact (if any) death penalty status has on murder rates and to assess the relative safety of the public and police in each of these groups.
Those groups were:
The individual states themselves.
Death-Penalty States — states that had the death penalty throughout the study period.
Non-Death-Penalty States — states that did not have the death penalty at any time during the study period.
Transitional States — states that had the death penalty at the beginning of the study period but subsequently abolished it judicially or by legislation.
The United States as a whole.
For public safety and officer safety rankings, we also looked at where states stood in comparison to one another based upon their current death-penalty status. In that part of our analysis, we moved the four states that abolished the death penalty in 2020 or later from the death penalty group to the transitional group. We also analyzed state execution data to see what impact, if any, the number of executions carried out had on state public- and officer-safety rankings.
The data in the transitional states was especially important in this analysis.
• If the death penalty were a deterrent, the hypothesis would be that murders in the transitional states would rise following abolition, both in terms of increased homicide rates in the transitional states themselves and by comparison to murder rates in the death-penalty and non-death-penalty states as a whole.
• Likewise, if the death penalty were necessary to protect law enforcement, the rates at which police were killed should noticeably increase both in the transitional states themselves and in comparison to the trends in death-penalty and non-death-penalty states as a whole.
• And, if — as opponents of death-penalty abolition had argued — police officers were especially vulnerable without the death penalty and its repeal would lead to “open season on police officers,” you'd expect to see not just an increase in the rate at which police officers were killed, but an increase in the percentage of the state’s murders in which officer were victims.
Here is what we found.
II. States With No Death Penalty Had the Lowest Murder Rates
Facts have long been the enemy of policies that are grounded in myth and fear. Murder data and the death penalty are a case in point. Contrary to the myth, the data strongly suggest that the death penalty makes no measurable contribution to public safety. The public was not safer in death penalty states and did not become safer over time the longer a state had the death penalty.
The data show that, as a group, states that never had the death penalty had by far the lowest murder rates: 4.749 murders per 100,000 population, compared to 6.494 for death penalty states and 6.255 for the United States as a whole. That is a murder rate 1.37 times lower than in the long-time death penalty states and 1.32 times lower than in the U.S. as a whole. (Table 1.)
The murder rates in the transitional states also pose a challenge to the deterrence hypothesis. In those states, the 33-year murder rate was three percent higher than the murder rate of the death penalty states that did not later repeal capital punishment, seven percent higher than the national murder rate, and 41% higher than the long-time abolitionist states. The comparison to the death penalty states would make sense from a deterrence perspective if the murder rate in the transitional states had risen over time relative to the death penalty states. But that is not what happened. The murder rate in the transitional states started higher and then fell over time, eventually mirroring the trends in the death penalty states, even after the transitional states had ended capital punishment.
Figure 1, below, show the trends over time based upon state death-penalty status. The overall murder rate in the transitional states was substantially higher than all other categories of states from 1987 through 1994, finally dropping below the murder rates in the other death penalty states in 1995. After again topping the death penalty states in 1996, it remained below the murder rates in those states in 21 of the 23 following years. The murder rate in the transitional states has remained very close to, and even slightly below, the national rate for the last twenty-five years.
The murder rate in the states that retained the death penalty throughout the study period was above the national average for all 33 years in the study. By contrast, in all 33 years covered by the study, states that never authorized capital punishment at any time during the study period had murder rates that were well below the national average.
While the cumulative murder rates and murder trends of each of the death-penalty groupings is instructive, it is still possible that they are skewed by disproportionally higher or lower murder rates in large states within each group. For instance, did the murder rates in states like Texas and Florida skew the overall murder rate of the death penalty states as a whole? Did the murder rate in Illinois skew the overall murder rate of the transitional states? To help determine whether, and to what extent, state death-penalty status provides meaningful information about murder rates, we created a color-coded table displaying the death-penalty status of each state and ranking the states from safest to least safe.2 (Table 2, below.)
What we found not only corroborated our conclusions from the murder data, it strengthened those conclusions: states that never had the death penalty tend by far to be the safest in the country. Half of the 12 long-time abolitionist states were among the ten safest states in the country; seven ranked among the 11 safest states. 83.3% of these states (10 of 12) had murder rates below the national average. And the 4.749 murder rate per 100,000 population, already substantially below the murder rate in death penalty states, was in fact skewed by the high murder rate in Detroit. Excluding Michigan — the only long-term abolitionist state to rank in the bottom third of states in public safety — the murder rate for the other 11 non-death penalty states fell by an astounding twenty percent to 3.799 per 100,000 population, or 58.5% the murder rate in the long-time death penalty states.
Further, the rest of the safest states in the country had either recently abolished the death penalty, commuted their death rows, or used capital punishment very infrequently. Ten of the safest 24 states were long-term abolitionists.3 Six more had abolished the death penalty either during4 or after5 the study period. And of the remaining eight death penalty states, two had no one on death row,6 one had not executed anyone in the past fifty years,7 four others had averaged fewer than an execution per decade since the 1960s,8 and only one had carried out even eight executions since 1961.9
On the other hand, 92% of the states that ranked in the bottom half of public safety — including all but two that had a murder rate above the national average — were death penalty states for most or all of the study period. Nine of the twelve least safe states (75%) were long-time death penalty states,10 along with the transitional states of Illinois, Maryland, and New Mexico. Likewise, 14 of the 18 least safe states had the death penalty throughout the three-decade-plus study period.11
In short, murder rates in individual states tend to be higher if the state has the death penalty; and, collectively, murder rates are higher in states that have the death penalty than in states that do not.
But what about the states that had the death penalty and subsequently abolished it? The most succinct description of what occurred after abolition is, “nothing” — or at least nothing systematic. There is no consistent pattern among the transitional states. Illinois, Maryland, and New York — each with large urban centers — and New Mexico have murder rates higher than the national rate and higher than the overall murder rate for the death penalty states. Connecticut, Delaware, and New Jersey have murder rates far below the national rate and at or below the overall murder rate for the non-death penalty states.
Similarly, there is no distinct pattern of change in these states following abolition. States that had a higher-than-average murder rate before abolition had a higher-than-average murder rate afterwards. States that had a lower-than-average murder rate before abolition had a lower-than-average murder rate afterwards. The data over time also suggest that, after the major decline in urban murders in the 1990s, the murder rates in the individual transitional states tend to track the trends nationwide.
Homicide rates did not spike following abolition. They did not rise disproportionately to increases in other categories of states; they did not fall disproportionately to murder rates in death penalty states or non-death penalty states. Instead, there was no discernible pattern in the pre- and post-abolition murder rates in the transitional states. Yet, while abolition had no distinctive effect on murder rates in the transitional states, one fact was clear: the surge in murders predicted by the deterrence hypothesis never materialized.12
III. Police Were Least Safe in States With the Death Penalty
A second major fiction advanced by death-penalty proponents is that the death penalty is necessary to protect law enforcement personnel. The FBI data, however, actually show that having the death penalty has not made officers safer. Over the course of the 33-year period we analyzed, law enforcement officers were disproportionately killed in the line of duty in states that had the death penalty, as compared to states that didn’t. Police were the least safe in death penalty states and the safest in the states that had most recently abolished capital punishment.
Between 1987 and 2019, police officers in death penalty states were murdered at an annualized rate of 2.119 officers per 10 million population. That was 1.11 times higher than the national rate of 1.905 officer-victim murders per year per 10 million population. By contrast, the annual officer-victim murder rate in non-death penalty states was 1.563 per 10 million population — 1.36 times lower than in the death penalty states. (Table 3.) That the risk of a police officer being murdered in the line of duty was so much lower in states that had long abolished the death penalty than it was in states in which capital punishment was a long-time fixture exposes as false the notion that the death penalty is necessary for officer safety.
But perhaps even more interestingly, officers were least likely — and substantially less so — to be murdered in states that had previously authorized capital punishment but had recently abolished it. In these transitional states, an average of 1.320 officers were killed per year per 10 million population. That rate was 1.61 times lower than the officer-victim murder rate in death penalty states and 1.44 times lower than the national officer-victim murder rate.
Killings of police in the line of duty are very rare and represent a tiny fraction of all murders. Because of this, the year-to-year numbers are volatile, especially at the state level. In particular, the yearly numbers in the non-death penalty states — the blue trend line in Figure 2, above — exhibit broad fluctuations, with several dramatic spikes up and down in the early 1990s. There are spikes as well on the green line depicting transitional states, mostly reflecting localized events in New York and New Mexico. But most of those spikes occurred before those states abolished the death penalty, so clearly abolition did not play a role in the increases or declines in murders of law enforcement personnel.
Viewed over the longer term, however, historic patterns emerge for each of the categories of states we examined. Defying the deterrence hypothesis, the rates at which police officers are killed is higher most years in states that have the death penalty than in states that don’t. The officer-murder rate also is lowest most years in transitional states that once had the death penalty but later abolished it. Again defying the deterrence hypothesis, murders of police remained significantly lower in the transitional states than in the other death penalty states even after the transitional states abolished the death penalty.
To control for the volatility of annual officer-victim murder rates, we generated trend lines for each of the categories of state death-penalty status. When we did so, the results were striking and corroborate our earlier findings. Each class of states experienced a decline in the rate of officer-victim killings and the downward slope of the trends among each set of states were similar. The trends, however, still indicated that police were safest in states that would eventually abolish the death penalty and then in states without a death penalty, and were least safe in states that had and kept capital punishment.
When we broke down the data state by state and ranked the states by officer safety, the gap between the safety of officers in death penalty retentionist states and in states that never had or later abolished the death penalty was even more dramatic. (Table 4.) Twelve of the fourteen most dangerous states for law enforcement (85.7%) were death penalty states, including 9 of the 14 states that have carried out the most executions in the past half-century. Likewise, 22 of the 25 states that placed in the bottom half in officer safety in the U.S. (88.0%) were death penalty states, including 13 of the 15 states with the most executions. Neither having the death penalty nor aggressively carrying it out made officers safer than they were in states with no death penalty.
On the other hand, six of the seven safest states for law enforcement (85.7%) and seven of the safest nine (77.8%) never had the death penalty or had abolished it during the study period. Five of those states had no death penalty and two others repealed their capital punishment statutes during the study period. The only other two states among that group — Wyoming and Oregon — have the death penalty on their statute books but are functionally abolitionist. Neither currently has anyone on its death row.
Overall, the data revealed a strong inverse correlation between having the death penalty and officer-victim murder rates. Six of the seven transitional states (85.7%) and ten of the twelve non-death penalty states (83.3%) ranked in the top half of the nation in officer safety. By comparison, only 8 of 31 death penalty states (29.0%) were among the safer half of states for law enforcement personnel. Quantified numerically, the odds that a death penalty state’s officer-victim murder rate would place it in the bottom half of the nation for officer safety13 were 14.67 times greater than for a transitional state14 and 12.22 times greater than for a non-death penalty state.15
The bottom line is, for whatever the reason, it is more dangerous to be a police officer in a state that has the death penalty.
IV. States that had Most Recently Abolished the Death Penalty had the Lowest Percentage of Murders Involving Officer Victims
If the death penalty has special value in protecting police, murders in which police are victims should comprise a smaller percentage of all murders in states that have the death penalty than in states that don’t. At least that is what deterrence theory would suggest. But it turns out that there is virtually no difference (eight one-thousandths of a percent) in the percentages between death penalty states and non-death-penalty states. (Table 5, below.)
Moreover, the formerly death-penalty states that most recently abolished capital punishment have a much lower percentage of murders in which officers are victims than either the death penalty states or the non-death penalty states. And in most of the more than three decades of years we studied, the percentage of murders in which officers are victims was lower in the transitional states — both before and after they had abolished the death penalty.
Once again, the data disprove the deterrence hypothesis.
The FBI data show that murders of law enforcement officers comprised 0.305% of murders committed in the United States between 1987 and 2019. Law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty accounted for one-third of one percent of all murders in both death penalty states (0.327% of all murders) and non-death penalty states (0.335% of murders) during that time period. But in the transitional states, murders of officers comprised just two-tenths of one percent of all murders, 1.51 times below the national average and more than 1.6 times below the averages for both the death penalty and non-death penalty states.
The state-by-state table of officer-victim murders as a percentage of all homicides (Table 6, above) dramatically illustrates the relationship between transitional states, death penalty usage, and the relative safety of police officers. The states in which police were comparatively the safest were states that had most recently abolished the death penalty, didn’t have the death penalty, or had a death penalty but didn’t use it.
With no death penalty and no murders of police officers, Vermont had the lowest percentage of officer-victim murders and the best Relative Officer-Safety ranking in the country. Four transitional states had the next lowest percentage of murders involving law enforcement victims,16 and five of the seven states that made up the transitional state category (71.4%) ranked in the top 8 in relative officer safety.17
None of the eleven states with the lowest percentage of murders with law enforcement victims had active execution chambers. In addition to the transitional states, three of these states had no death penalty at any time during the study period.18 The other three were death penalty states, but one had no one on death row19 and two had governor-imposed moratoria on executions.20
Two-thirds of the U.S. states had a larger percentage of officer-victim murders than the national average. That included roughly three-quarters of the death penalty states (23 of 31, 74.2%), two-thirds of the non-death penalty states (8 of 12, 66.7%), and 28.6% (2 of 7) of the transitional states.
V. What does the homicide data tell us about the death penalty and public safety?
Three decades of FBI homicide data show us that the public and police are safer in states that don’t have the death penalty than in states that do. They show us that police are safest in states that eventually abolished the death penalty. They also show us that the percentage of homicides in which police are victims is basically the same in states that have long had the death penalty and in states that have long ago abolished it, but is significantly lower in the transitional states that recently abolished the death penalty.
The data also demonstrate that when abolition does occur, there is no spike in murders afterwards. Murder rates don't suddenly and disproportionately rise. Nor has abolition of the death penalty led to an increase in murders of law enforcement, let alone “open season” on police officers.
From a deterrence perspective, none of these data make sense — and that is the point. As a public policy, having the death penalty does not make the public or police safer. Likewise, from a deterrence perspective, there is no sensible explanation for why a state that once had but later abolished the death penalty should have fewer killings of police in the line of duty or a lower percentage of murders involving law enforcement victims than states that had and retained the death penalty. That is because there is no cause-effect relationship between having or not having the death penalty and murder rates.
But it also makes no sense to assert that the statistical correlation between recent death-penalty abolition and greater policer-officer safety is a product of causation. Police officers are not less likely to be killed because a state has not yet abolished the death penalty but will soon do so. Nor is there a principled argument that abolishing the death penalty in a given state will make police in that state comparatively less likely than the public at large to be murdered. Instead, the relationship is the other way around. Murder rates — and particularly the rates at which police are killed — have a political impact, contributing to the political environment in which death penalty abolition does or does not occur.
The politics of the death penalty is a politics of fear — a fear that makes it much more difficult for legislatures to engage in meaningful debate about the death penalty as a policy. Moreover, when it comes to legislative consideration of criminal justice policies and practices, police and prosecutors have a disproportionate influence. When legislators perceive that violent crime is rising or has gone out of control, they are more likely to reflexively “back the blue” and less likely to seriously consider legal reforms that make the criminal justice system less punitive.
But when it comes to the death penalty, the anti-reform voices of prosecutors and police are less powerful and less relevant to the public policy debate when murder rates are down and when there are no, or comparatively few, high-profile police killings in the line of duty. As a consequence, abolition of the death penalty is — as the data show — much more likely to occur in states in which killings of police officers are already low, and particularly where they are already low as a percentage of killings overall.
VI. Executions Do Not Make the Public or Police Safer
We also analyzed execution patterns in the United States to determine whether executions, as opposed to a state’s death penalty status, deter murder and make police safer. They don’t. Cross-referencing FBI homicide data with state-by-state data on executions shows that executions serve no measurable public safety function. Executions have not made either the public or law enforcement personnel safer.
In Part II of this report, we presented data demonstrating that the safest states in the United States are states that do not have the death penalty. The next safest are states that have it but don’t use it. (See Table 2, above.) In fact, only one of the 23 states with the lowest murder rates has carried out even eight executions since Furman v. Georgia struck down capital punishment in 1972 and Gregg v. Georgia upheld the constitutionality of newly enacted death penalty statutes in 1976. None of the others has carried out more than five. None of the 23 safest states in the United States has averaged more than one execution per decade since the 1960s.
Part III of this report presented evidence that, statistically, police were safer in states that had no death penalty than in states that do, and were the safest in states that had most recently abolished capital punishment. Seven of the 9 safest states for law enforcement don’t have the death penalty. The two that have the death penalty don’t have anyone on death row.21 Of the safest 27 states, 19 don’t have the death penalty. And of the seven safest death penalty states for police, four either have formal moratoria on executions or no one on death row.22
Conversely, executions have not made and do not make the public or police safer. None of the states that have carried out the most executions are leaders in public safety. Most rank among the least safe states in the nation. And that is especially true when it comes to the safety of law enforcement personnel. Nineteen of the 23 most dangerous states for law enforcement are death penalty states, including 12 of the 15 states that have carried out the most executions in the U.S. since 1976.
Seven states are collectively responsible for 75% of the first 1,600 executions in the modern United States death penalty era: Texas (590 executions), Oklahoma (126), Virginia (113), Florida (106), Missouri (100), Georgia (77), and Alabama (76). See Table 7, below. They are the only U.S. states to have carried out executions in at least half of the calendar years since the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of new death penalty statutes in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976, and they have executed prisoners far more frequently than that.
They are the country’s habitual executioners.
Texas has conducted executions in 42 different calendar years since resuming the practice in 1982, averaging 13.8 executions per year. It has carried out at least one execution every year for 41 consecutive years.
Florida has put prisoners to death in 39 calendar years since it resumed executions in 1979, including a span of 24 consecutive years from 1983 to 2006.
Georgia and Alabama have carried out executions in 32 and 31 calendar years, respectively, since 1983. Virginia executed prisoners in 30 separate years between 1982 and 2017 — including 21 consecutive years from 1984 to 2004 — before abolishing the death penalty in 2021.
Oklahoma did not resume executions until 1990 but has carried them out in 27 different calendar years, including every year from 1995 to 2015.
Missouri resumed executions one year earlier, in 1989. Like Oklahoma, it has conducted at least one execution in 27 different years.
Each of these states has carried out at least one execution in at least 73% and as many as 95% of the post-Gregg calendar years since resuming executions. And the execution totals in these habitually executing states are as deep as they are wide. In 2000, its peak execution year, Texas put 40 prisoners to death. Oklahoma conducted 18 executions in 2001; Virginia 14 in 1999. Missouri carried out 10 executions in 2014; Georgia 9 in 2016. Florida put 8 prisoners to death in both 1984 and 2014. Alabama carried out 6 executions each in 2009 and 2011 and is on track to do so again this year.
If executions have made the public or police comparatively safer over the course of the 48 years since states resumed carrying them out, these are the states that should prove it. But the data show that executions have not made these states comparatively safer.
All seven of the habitually executing states rank in the bottom half of states in public safety from 1987 to 2019. All but Virginia, whose 30-year murder rate ranked it 28th compared to other states, had murder rates that were higher than the national average. Six of the habitual executioners ranked 30th or below in public safety. Missouri, Georgia, and Alabama ranked among the most dangerous states in the nation, with public safety ratings of 37, 40, and 47 respectively.
The habitual executioners ranged from the middle of the pack to among the nation’s worst for officer safety. Although Texas accounts for 37% of all the executions carried out by U.S. states (and almost as many as the rest of the habitual executioners combined), its law enforcement officers were still dying from murder in the line of duty at the 12th highest rate of any state. Officers were safer in 40 other states than they were in Georgia. They were safer in 42 other states than they were in Alabama.
The same is true for South Carolina, the other U.S. state that is planning to embark upon a new execution spree. The death penalty in the Palmetto State hasn't made either the public or law enforcement safer. South Carolina has carried out more executions than 41 other states. But its murder rate places it 45th in the country in public safety and it ranks 47th in the country in officer safety.
Nor do executions provide extra protection for law enforcement than for the public at large. In five of the seven habitually executing states, the percentage of murders involving law enforcement victims was higher than the national average, with a sixth state fractionally below the average. See Table 6. Compared to the nation as a whole, police were relatively less safe in these high execution states than were the public at large. Executions had no police-protection effect.
And even with its already extremely high overall murder rate, a higher percentage of South Carolina murders involved law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty than in 35 other states. Executions have not made South Carolina police safer relative to the general public.
In short, the states that are now most actively carrying out executions are among the least safe for the public and the most dangerous for police. Their after-the-fact focus on harsh punishment has failed to execute their way into violence prevention. The death penalty has proven itself worthless as a public safety policy. Instead, it has become a pointless exercise in cruelty.
Addendum:
The United States reached its 1,600th execution in a multi-state execution spree between September 20 and September 26, 2024 that took the lives of five death-row prisoners:
Two, Marcellus Williams (Missouri) and Freddie Owens (South Carolina), were almost certainly innocent. Williams was executed over the opposition of the victim’s family, the county prosecutor, and multiple members of his jury. No physical evidence linked him to the crime and the trial prosecutor mishandled the murder weapon during trial, contaminating the DNA evidence that could have proven him innocent. Owens’ co-defendant in his robbery-murder case said he had been threatened with the death penalty unless he implicated Owens, and signed a sworn affidavit that Owens did not kill anyone and was not present and had no involvement in the robbery.
A third, Emmanuel Littlejohn, Jr., also may not have killed anyone. His prosecutor pursued the death penalty against him and his co-defendant on a felony-murder theory and presented eyewitnesses in the co-defendant’s trial who testified that the co-defendant had been the killer. Littlejohn’s lawyer failed to interview or present those witnesses at his trial, even after the prosecutor argued to the jury that Littlejohn was the killer. The Oklahoma Board of Pardons and Parole recommended clemency for Littlejohn but Governor Kevin Stitt ignored their recommendation.
A fourth, Travis Mullis in Texas, had a long history of mental illness. He was permitted to waive his appeals and never received meaningful judicial review of his case. Ten percent of the executions in the U.S. in the past 50 years have involved “volunteers” whose appeals were deemed to have been waived.
The fifth, Alan Miller, had been sentenced to death by his trial judge even though two of his jurors (all of whom had sworn a willingness to impose a death sentence if warranted) had voted for life. In almost every other death penalty state in in the United States, those votes would have meant a life sentence. Seventeen of the last 19 executions in Alabama that culminated in Mr. Miller’s execution involved a non-unanimous jury vote on sentencing or a judicial override of a jury vote for life.
Each of these executions in the march to 1,600 illustrated one or more of the serious systemic flaws in the way the death penalty is administered in this country. Collectively, they are further evidence that the courts cannot be relied upon to produce principled penological outcomes in capital cases. But the homicide data exposes another devastating reality about our capital punishment system: it is a failure, too, as an instrument of public safety.
The homicide portion of the study was a follow-up to a study I previously conducted at the Death Penalty Information Center based on FBI Uniform Crime statistics from 1987 to 2015. The information on the number of murders nationwide and in each state comes from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, Annual Murder Data from 1987 to 2019. The information on murders of law enforcement personnel nationwide and in each state comes from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, Law Enforcement Officers Killed & Assaulted, Officers Feloniously Killed Annual Data (LEOKA reports), 1987 through 2019.
We calculated murder rates per 100,000 population for each state by dividing the number of murders in that state during that year by the population of that state that year and multiplying by 100,000. We also calculated the rates at which police officers were killed in the line of duty by dividing the number of killings of law enforcement in each state each year by the population of the state for that year. However, because the numbers of murders in which law enforcement officers were victims was so small, we would have introduced mathematic errors had we rounded their totals and calculated them based upon murders per 100,000 population. To avoid rounding errors, we displayed the still very small numbers as murders per 1,000,000 population. We then calculated each state’s overall murder rate and rate of murders involving officer victims by dividing the average of the total number of killings in each state for the years 1987 through 2019 by the average population for the state over the 33 years in the study. Special thanks to Celeste Kump for her invaluable research assistance in updating the data and calculating the murder rates and for her contribution to the data analysis.
This analysis also draws on a presentation I made in August 2017 during a panel discussion organized jointly by the Committee on Capital Punishment of the American Bar Association Section of Civil Rights & Social Justice and the Death Penalty Committee of the New York City Bar Association and testimony I presented to the Revenue Committee of the Wyoming State Senate in March 2021. See American Bar Association Section of Civil Rights & Social Justice and New York City Bar Association, Life After the Death Penalty: Implications for Retentionist States (Aug. 14, 2017); Testimony of Robert Brett Dunham, Hearing on SF-150 — Repealing the Death Penalty, Wyoming State Senate Revenue Committee (March 4, 2021).
In the tables in this report, death penalty states are depicted with a wheat background; non-death penalty states with blue; transitional states with green; and the U.S. as a whole with a bright yellow background. The states that abolished the death penalty after the study period have two color codes — green for their names and execution status, reflecting their current death penalty status, and wheat for the murder data, reflecting their death penalty status during the years that were analyzed as part of the study.
North Dakota, Iowa, Maine, and Vermont ranked 2 through 5 in public safety. Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Hawaii ranked 9 through 11. Rhode Island ranked 15, Wisconsin 17, and West Virginia 22.
Connecticut (19), New Jersey (21), and Washington (24).
New Hampshire (1), Washington (18), and Colorado (20).
Wyoming (12) and Oregon (13).
Kansas (23).
South Dakota (6), Idaho (8), Nebraska (14), and Montana (16). For information on executions by jurisdiction prior to Furman v. Georgia, see M. Watt Espy and John Ortiz Smykla, Executions in the United States, 1608-2002: The ESPY File, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor] (2016). For a pdf version of the Espy File, see Executions by State on the Death Penalty Information Center’s Espy File web page.
Utah (7).
Louisiana (50), Mississippi (49), Alabama (47), South Carolina (45), Nevada (44), Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia (42 through 39).
The states noted immediately above, plus California, North Carolina, Arizona, Texas, and Florida (37 through 33).
The Death Penalty Policy Project is currently undertaking a second homicide study comparing the changes in murder rates in the five years before and after a state abolishes the death penalty to the changes in murder rates in death penalty states, non-death penalty states, the other transitional states, and the nation as a whole during the same time periods.
The odds were 22:9, or 2.444:1.
The odds that the officer-victim murder rate in a transitional state would rank in the bottom half of U.S. states for officer safety were 1:6, or 0.167:1.
The odds that the officer-victim murder rate in a non-death penalty state would rank in the bottom half of U.S. states for officer safety were 2:10, or 0.2:1.
Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, and Illinois (ranked 2 through 5, respectively, in relative officer safety).
New York ranked 8th.
Vermont (ranked 1), Rhode Island (6), and Michigan (10).
Wyoming (7).
California (9) and Pennsylvania (11).
The two that do, Oregon and Wyoming, have no one on death row.
See note 21, above, plus California and Pennsylvania.
The Death Penalty Policy Project (“DP3”) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization housed within the Phillips Black Inc. public interest legal practice. DP3 provides information, analysis, and critical commentary on capital punishment and the role the death penalty plays in mass incarceration in the United States.