There was a surge in executions in 2025. Here’s how the Supreme Court responded.

In 2025, the United States saw a surge in executions after a period of decline. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 47 people were put to death in 11 states, the highest annual execution total since 2009.

As I previously reported for SCOTUSblog, several factors led to the surge, including the Trump administration’s embrace of the death penalty, a marked increase in executions in Florida (from six in 2023 and one in 2024 to 19 last year), and the end of death penalty moratoriums in states, such as Arizona, that had paused executions for years as they reassessed the procedures and methods they used to carry them out.

The Supreme Court also played a role by denying every request to postpone an execution that it fielded in 2025, most of the time doing so without any noted disagreement. Here’s a brief overview of those decisions, as well as a look at the coming year.

Denials with almost no disagreement

Among the 47 people who were executed in 2025, 34 filed emergency stay applications with the Supreme Court days or weeks before their scheduled execution. They asked for a postponement so that they could continue to challenge their conviction or death sentence (and so that the justices would have more time to consider their petition for review).

Such applications are rarely viewed favorably by the court, which typically seeks to avoid intervening in capital cases at the 11th hour. But the court’s unbroken streak of denials over the past year still felt notable, in part because so few of the orders indicated that any justice disagreed with the decision to allow the execution to go forward, and even fewer involved a written dissent.

According to SCOTUSblog’s database of capital cases, just six of the court’s orders in 2025 disposing of emergency stay applications acknowledged any disagreement between the justices. In four of these  cases, some or all of the justices who would have granted a stay of execution did not explain why. The noted disagreement typically came from the court’s liberal wing. Indeed, over the past year, just one Republican appointee – Justice Neil Gorsuch – publicly disagreed with the court’s refusal to delay an execution. He did so in Hoffman v. Westcott, in which Jessie Hoffman, who was sentenced to death in Louisiana after being convicted of the rape and murder of Mary Elliott, challenged the state’s plan to execute him using nitrogen hypoxia under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. Specifically, Hoffman contended that the execution method would interfere with his meditative breathing, which was part of his Buddhist faith. (While Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson indicated that they would have paused Hoffman’s execution, they did not explain their decision.)

There were two other written dissents in 2025, both of which came from Sotomayor and were joined by Kagan and Jackson. These opinions were much longer than Gorsuch’s two-paragraph dissent in Hoffman, and Sotomayor employed a harsher tone, criticizing her colleagues’ refusal to address what she felt were significant legal questions raised by the litigants on death row.

For example, in Crawford v. Mississippi, Sotomayor contended that the Supreme Court had “abandon[ed] its duty” to resolve an “important question” about whether its 2018 decision holding “that lawyers may not override a defendant’s explicit and unequivocal decision not to concede guilt at trial” applied retroactively “to cases on collateral review.” That question – raised by Charles Ray Crawford, who was sentenced to death in Mississippi after being convicted of kidnapping, raping, and murdering Kristy Ray – “divided lower courts” and deserved the court’s attention, Sotomayor continued, even if Crawford could have raised it earlier.

But perhaps the more memorable of Sotomayor’s two dissents came in Boyd v. Hamm, a case in which Anthony Boyd, who was sentenced to death in Alabama after being convicted of the kidnapping and murder of Gregory Huguley, asked to die by firing squad rather than nitrogen hypoxia. Boyd contended that the use of nitrogen hypoxia, which he claimed would lead to his slow suffocation, violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

In her nine-page opinion, Sotomayor urged readers to imagine suffocating to death over the course of four minutes. “That is what awaits Anthony Boyd tonight,” she wrote. “When the gas starts flowing, he will immediately convulse. He will gasp for air. And he will thrash violently against the restraints holding him in place as he experiences this intense psychological torment until he finally loses consciousness.”

Sotomayor contended that the court had denied Boyd “the barest form of mercy” by refusing his request to die by firing squad, “which would kill him in seconds.” “The Constitution would grant him that grace. My colleagues do not,” she wrote.

In light of the dearth of noted disagreement in capital cases in 2025, it is unlikely that the court’s denial streak will end anytime soon, or that we’ll learn why, exactly, these claims are being denied. That said, the fact that two of the three written dissents centered on nitrogen hypoxia may signal that a case on its use may make it to the oral argument docket in the near future.

The death penalty in 2026

So far in 2026, the Supreme Court has fielded just one request to delay an execution, which it denied on Jan. 28 without any noted disagreement. It will almost certainly receive several more such requests in the coming months, because, as of Tuesday, 18 more executions are scheduled for the year ahead, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Additionally, by early July, the court is expected to issue its rulings in two death penalty-related cases it is addressing on its oral argument docket. The first is on the role IQ tests should play in applying the ban on executing people who are intellectually disabled. The second is on how to determine whether a litigant has forfeited his or her right to challenge potential racial discrimination in jury selection.

Those two rulings could affect capital cases across the country and potentially continue a trend highlighted by Daniel Harawa in a July 2025 SCOTUSblog post: During the 2024-25 term, the court was, as Harawa put it, “surprisingly sympathetic to people on death row” in cases that made it to the oral argument docket, even as it denied every emergency request that it received to delay an execution.

By early July, we should also have a better sense of whether 2025’s execution surge will continue this year. Several death penalty appeals are still pending in the lower courts, and the Supreme Court will undoubtedly receive more such emergency applications.