NEW YORK — The United States was the only Western democracy that executed prisoners last year, even as an increasing number of U.S. states are moving to abolish the death penalty, Amnesty International announced Monday.
The United States’ 43 executions in 2011 ranked it fifth in the world in capital punishment, the rights group said in its annual review of worldwide death-penalty trends. U.S. executions were down from 46 a year earlier.
“If you look at the company we’re in globally, it’s not the company we want to be in: China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq,” said Suzanne Nossell, executive director of Amnesty International USA.
Illinois banned the death penalty last year, and Oregon adopted a moratorium on executions. Maryland and Connecticut are close to banning executions, Amnesty said. And more than 800,000 Californians signed petitions to put a referendum on the state ballot in November that would abolish the death penalty.
However, 34 U.S. states have the death penalty.
Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks U.S. trends, told the Associated Press that last year 78 prisoners received death sentences, down from an average of more than 300 annually a few years ago.
The United States was the only member of the G8 group of developed nations to use the death penalty last year. Japan recorded no executions for the first time in 19 years, Amnesty reported.
Meanwhile, a surge of executions last year in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen pushed the worldwide total higher than the year before, according to Amnesty. Although the global rate of executions has declined by about a third in the past decade, to 676 documented worldwide in 2011, about 18,750 people remained on death row at the end of the year in 20 nations, Amnesty said.
