First came the Manhattan shooting death of a health insurance CEO.
In the months that followed, a young couple working for the Israeli embassy, a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband, a Ukrainian refugee, a conservative activist, a National Guard member deployed in the nation's capital and a legendary Hollywood director and his producer wife were all slain.
The spate of high-profile killings, and the federal and state criminal cases that have followed, thrust into the spotlight this year the death penalty as prosecutors have vowed to pursue the most serious punishment at stake.
At the same time, President Trump has pushed to reinvigorate executions -- a bid at odds with public approval, as most capital juries rejected death sentences this year in favor of life.
Despite heightened attention, political pressure and a surge in executions this year, experts told The Hill that the death penalty in the U.S. still seems headed toward a demise.
"Executions are a fairly accurate reflection of a country's taste for retribution and taste for vengeance," said Corinna Lain, a University of Richmond law professor and author of "Secrets of the Killing State: the Untold Story of Lethal Injection."
"But if you want to know where the death penalty is going -- if you want to know the death penalty's future -- it's not executions that you look at," she continued. "That marks a particular moment in time. What you look at to determine the death penalty's future is death sentencing."
Only 23 new death sentences were approved this year, down from 26 in 2024, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPI)'s recent report on 2025 capital punishment statistics found.
Though the total shows a slight increase from the four years before that, it amounts to a marked decline over decades. In 2015, there were 49 death sentences imposed, and in 2005, there were 139.
On top of that, some 56% of the juries faced with the choice between a life or death sentence in capital cases rejected the latter option, the report found, and polling firm Gallup's 2025 death penalty deep dive saw support for executions fall to 52% -- a 50-year low.
Robin Maher, DPI's executive director, said in an interview that declining support for capital punishment can be attributed to a "variety of reasons," from concerns about the accuracy about the death penalty and who it's being used against to the punishment's efficiency, lack of deterring effect and "tremendous" investment of financial and personnel resources they require.
"I think what the American people are saying is that they are not getting what they believed they would receive from this bargain, and increasingly, they are rejecting the death penalty as an answer to violent crime," Maher said.
The renewed attention on the death penalty began in December last year when as President Biden's term winded down, he commuted sentences for 37 of the 40 prisoners on federal death row from death to life in prison.
It left just three federal inmates facing execution: two notorious mass shooters whose killings took place in a church and synagogue and one of the brothers responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing.
The move infuriated Trump, the president-to-be and a longtime advocate for capital punishment, who vowed that he would direct his Department of Justice to "vigorously pursue the death penalty" as soon as he was inaugurated.
Within hours of returning to the White House, Trump ordered his appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi to pursue the death penalty for "all crimes of a severity demanding its use," ending the moratorium on federal executions the Biden administration implemented in 2021.
One such case was already teed up.
Weeks earlier, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down as he left his Midtown hotel for a conference. Luigi Mangione, the then-26-year-old scion of a prominent Maryland family, was arrested in connection with the killing after a manhunt.
Federal prosecutors charged Mangione with murder and other counts last December, putting the death penalty on the table, and Bondi ordered DOJ to pursue capital punishment against him in April.
The Justice Department has since signaled it may pursue the death penalty in federal cases against Elias Rodriguez, the Chicago man accused of fatally shooting Israeli embassy staffers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, and Rahmanaullah Lakanwal, the Afghan national accused of killing National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom in a shootout in Washington, D.C., that wounded another guardsman.
Capital punishment is also possible in the federal case against Vance Boelter, who is charged with killing former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman (D) and her husband at their home. In June, the state's then-acting U.S. attorney said it was "too early to tell" whether a death sentence would be sought but noted it's "one of the options."
High-profile state cases piled on public attention.
Utah prosecutors have said they will seek a death sentence for Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old accused of killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk, while Los Angeles prosecutors told the L.A. Times that no decision had been made about pursuing capital punishment against Nick Reiner, charged with the alleged murders of his parents, Hollywood director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner.
The man charged in Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska's stabbing on Charlotte's light rail system faces both state and federal charges that may carry a death sentence, for which Trump has expressed support.
Lain said there's no "crystal ball" to show how the cases will play out.
"It's anyone's guess as to how politics will intersect with these very particular cases," she said.
However, she urged separating the political "bluster" and uses of the death penalty from the actual practice.
Maher noted, too, that elected officials have long been forced to meaningfully address high-profile tragedies. She suggested that it's one question whether prosecutors will feel pressured by Trump to seek a death sentence but a "completely different" question as to whether a jury will return one.
"And, if history is any guide, it's going to be extremely difficult to do that," Maher said.
That hasn't stopped Trump from pressing on.
Trump has long pushed for the death penalty, having famously paid in 1989 for full-page ads in major New York newspapers advocating for a revival of the death penalty in response to an assault where the so-called Central Park Five were wrongly convicted.
At the end of Trump's first term, 13 federal death row inmates were executed following a pause that lasted more than 15 years. The last of them took place on Jan. 16, 2021, when Dustin Higgs's death sentence for ordering the 1996 murders of three Maryland women was carried out by lethal injection. Trump oversaw the most federal executions since Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s, according to DPI.
Though Biden's moratorium put a stop to federal executions for the duration of his four-year term, state executions continued.
Though the death penalty went unused this year in more than half of the 27 states that still allow it, the nationwide total number of executions reached a 15-year high. The increase was driven by a surge in Florida, DPI's report found.
Florida executed 19 of the 47 people whose death sentences have been carried out this year in the U.S., some 40% of the year's total. It's a dramatic jump from 2024, which saw 25 total executions.
That spike has gone largely unaddressed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), Maher said.
"Governor DeSantis himself, in his sole authority, has selected who will be executed this year and assigned those death warrants," she said. "He has not given us any meaningful explanation for why we went from a single execution last year to 19 executions this year."
DeSantis's office did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, the state's top court this month lowered the bar for securing death sentences, upholding a law DeSantis passed in 2023 that allows non-unanimous capital juries to sentence people to death on an 8-4 vote.
It secured Florida as one of just two states to allow such non-unanimous decisions, joining Alabama which requires a 10-2 vote in agreement from capital juries. The ACLU which represents a defendant challenging the law said in a statement last week it would seek review from the U.S. Supreme Court.
About a third of this year's new death sentences were the result of non-unanimous jury verdicts for the second year in a row according to DPI's report. Just 15 capital juries reached unanimous death verdicts.
Maher called the finding "very significant," because capital jurors must be "death qualified" from the start, meaning they're not categorically opposed to returning a death sentence.
The dwindling appetite for death sentences even when easier won may spell doom for the punishment altogether Lain said.
"Today's death sentences are tomorrow's executions," she said. "And without new death sentences feeding the machinery of death,the death penalty will just die on the vine."