For example, Texas executed 40 people in 2000 and five in 2025, marking the seventh consecutive year that the state executed fewer than 10 people. The social appetite for the death penalty has diminished, resulting in a smaller death row population and fewer death penalty verdicts being sought by prosecutors and rendered by juries.
But all was not good news in the death penalty arena in 2025.
According to a January 30, 2025, Texas Tribune article, President Donald Trump signed 26 executive orders on his first day in office. One of those executive directives was titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety.” The directive ordered all U.S. attorneys, through a variety of measures, to not only increase the use of the death penalty but also make it easier to do so at the federal level.
In an unprecedented manner, President Trump encouraged states with the death penalty to follow the federal lead by making it easier to impose the death penalty for eligible crimes and expand its use for crimes made ineligible for its use by U.S. Supreme Court precedents.
The states responded. There were 25 executions in 2024, but they almost doubled to 47 in 2025. Florida led the way with 19 executions, followed by three states that carried out 5 executions each: Texas, Alabama, and South Carolina. The 47 executions marked the highest number of U.S. executions in 15 years, with 41 of those executions being carried out in Southern states.
Being a strong proponent of the death penalty, President Trump wants to reverse the trend toward lesser use of the death penalty, and he certainly accomplished that in his adopted home state of Florida with its execution spree.
What is abundantly clear is that Trump wants the Justice Department, through all of its assistant attorney generals, to challenge Supreme Court decisions that limit both the states and the federal government in how the death penalty is applied. In effect, the president wants the death penalty available for a host of crimes other than murder, such as drug trafficking, an array of sex offenses, and possibly crimes committed by the intellectually disabled.
The Tribune article last year pointed to the 2002 Supreme Court decision, Atkins v. Virginia, that limits the manner in which the death penalty can be applied against defendants with intellectual disabilities.
One of the cases affected by Atkins was Bobby Moore’s, a case from Harris County, Texas. Moore was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1980 murder of a 73-year-old Houston store clerk. In 2014, a lower Texas court followed the lead of Atkins, finding that Moore was too intellectually disabled to be executed.
However, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) disagreed, finding that even under the Atkins mandate, Moore was eligible for execution. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 reversed that decision, remanding the case back to the CCA. On remand, then Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg’s office filed a brief agreeing that Moore, under modern medical standards, had an intellectual disability and should not be executed.
Once again, the CCA brushed aside Moore’s intellectual disability claim, saying that even under modern medical standards, Moore was eligible for execution. That prompted Ogg to take the Moore case back to the Supreme Court for a second review. The high court again remanded the case back to the CCA with a finding that Moore was, in fact, intellectually disabled, but with a lot of disagreements among the justices as to what actually constitutes intellectual disability.
The Supreme Court’s finding prompted the CCA to vacate Moore’s death sentence and order that he be resentenced to life in prison. The CCA then urged Texas lawmakers to define acceptable medical clarity as to what constitutes intellectual disability. Moore is just one of the 32 cases since Atkins that the State has removed from death row because of intellectual disability, and as reported by the Tribune, there is still no law or Supreme Court decision to specifically define exactly what intellectual disability is in the death penalty context.
But it should be noted that Rep. Senfronia Thompson (D-Houston) and Sen. Borris Miles (D-Houston) introduced legislation last year to define intellectual disability. Both legislative measures died without a vote. This non-legislative action came on the heels of the CCA commuting Larry Estrada’s death sentence to a life sentence in April 2025, in the middle of the legislative session.
We surmise that Trump wants the Supreme Court to resolve this issue in a manner that favors the use of the death penalty in some circumstances involving defendants with intellectual disabilities.
It remains to be seen if, and how, the U.S. Justice Department will encourage as many executions as possible by the states over the next three years to satisfy the president.
