Mapping the Death Penalty

End of its Rope is an online database of death sentencing in the United States from 1990 to the present. The database was compiled by professor Brandon L. Garrett with the support of the University of Virginia School of Law. The data was used in the professor's 2017 book, "End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice".

The End of its Rope County Map shows the number of people sentenced to death in each county in each year from 1990. Using the time slider you can view the number of death sentences in each county in any year. Professor Garrett says that the map "shows how geographically isolated death sentencing has become."

The map is a little basic and it therefore a little hard to observe how death penalty instances have declined over the time period of the database. If you think you can create a better data visualization of the declining use of the death sentence in the United States then you can download the data yourself. The data is available free for free public use under a Creative Commons license.