The Majority of US States Currently Don't Have a Death Penalty

Support for the death penalty has dropped in recent years, but a shrinking majority of Americans remain in favor of it. However, as the Death Penalty Information Center laid out this week, a shrinking number of states are actually able to practice capital punishment.

Add up the 18 states where the death penalty is abolished, the three western states where the governors have placed formal moratoriums on executions, and the four states where lethal injection legal challenges have put a de facto moratorium on executions, and the states are split evenly. There are also seven states that, even without holds in place, haven't executed anyone in at least five years.

Add to that Ohio, Oklahoma, and now Arizona, where botched executions have at least temporarily halted the practice while the states review their procedures, and you're looking at 70 percent of the states where the death penalty can't happen, for the moment anyway.

Which isn't to say that states that have the death penalty are in danger of having to give it up; it's just to point out that no one on any side of the debate—pro or against capital punishment—should be happy with how capital punishment “works” now. Because, obviously, it doesn't.

Thus far the US Supreme Court has been doing its damnedest to avoid weighing in on the lethal injection debate, instead just lifting stays of execution in Missouri and then in Arizona without explanation, and letting whatever happens happen.

But with four botched executions this year, capital punishment being called unconstitutional in California, and federal judges making absurd suggestions in their dissenting opinions, one imagines the highest court in the land won't be able to stay above the fray for much longer.