U.S. Hits 42-Year High in ’97 With 74 Executions

More murderers were executed in U.S. prisons in 1997 than in any of the last 42 years.

Seventy-four of the nation’s more than 3,200 death row inmates were executed this year, the most since 76 were put to death in 1955. No state has executions scheduled for the rest of this year.

“The execution train is still speeding down the track, and it’s very hard to stop or even slow it,” said Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based group critical of how capital punishment is administered.

This year, 17 of the 38 states with death-penalty laws imposed what courts call the ultimate punishment. Texas led with 37 executions.

“We had a larger number partly due to a backlog of cases from 1996,” said Ward Tisdale of the Texas attorney general’s office.

Nationally, the rate of executions since the Supreme Court ended a four-year moratorium on capital punishment in 1976 is far below what it had been in decades past.

Between 1930 and 1967, 3,859 U.S. executions were carried out--an annual average of more than 100.

There have been 432 executions nationwide in the 20 years since Gary Gilmore was killed by a Utah firing squad in 1977.