Death Penalty Sentences Continue to Fall in the U.S.

Getting a death sentence in the United States is no longer as common.

According to the statistics provided by the Death Penalty Information Center, the number of people who were executed in 2015 fell by 20 percent from 35 in 2014 to 28, which is the lowest since 1991. The rate of people who were sentenced to death dropped by 33 percent with 49 people getting the sentence this year.

"New death sentences in the past decade are lower than in the decade preceding the Supreme Court's invalidation of capital punishment in 1972," the report wrote.

All of the executions occurred in six states with 86 percent of them in Texas, Missouri and Georgia. The other three states were Florida, Oklahoma and Virginia. This is the lowest number of states who carried out executions since 1988.

"The use of the death penalty is becoming increasingly rare and increasingly isolated in the United States," Robert Dunham, DPIC's executive director, said in a statement reported by NPR. "These are not just annual blips in statistics, but reflect a broad change in attitudes about capital punishment across the country."

The study noted that public opinion on the death penalty has changed significantly. The researchers cited the 2015 American Values Survey, which found that the majority of Americans would rather sentence a person convicted for murder to life without parole instead of the death penalty.

Despite the drop in executions, the researchers noted that the majority of the people who were executed had some kind of mental illness or intellectual disability.

 "The death penalty is supposed to be reserved for the worst of the worst crimes and the worst of the worst offenders," the report stated. "However, ... [t]wo-thirds of the 28 people executed in 2015 exhibited symptoms of severe mental illness, intellectual disability, the debilitating effects of extreme trauma and abuse, or some combination of the three."

For the full text of the report, click here.