Why does it take so long to carry out such a drastic sentence? The first reason lies precisely in its irreversible nature. A prison sentence can, in theory, be halted if a miscarriage of justice is discovered. An execution, of course, cannot. The US judicial system has therefore built a series of procedures around death sentences, designed to verify not only guilt, but also the fairness of the trial, the quality of the defence, the conduct of the prosecution, the selection of the jury and the very legality of the death sentence itself.
Contrary to a fairly widespread belief, the condemned person does not simply have an infinite number of appeals that they could lodge at will to gain time. The procedures are very strictly regulated. In a capital case tried by a state, there are generally several stages: a direct appeal against the conviction, so-called ‘post-conviction’ proceedings before the state courts, and then, where applicable, a federal habeas corpus petition to challenge certain violations of constitutional rights. A petition may then reach the Supreme Court of the United States, which remains free to decide whether or not to hear the case.
Each stage can take several years because a capital case is often vast in scope. It involves reviewing thousands of pages of trial transcripts, hearing from new witnesses, search for evidence that had not been disclosed to the defence, commission psychiatric or scientific expert reports, analyse DNA samples that are sometimes decades old, and verify whether the lawyers at the first trial properly defended their client. A judge may order a retrial. An appeal court may overturn only the death sentence whilst upholding the conviction. The prosecution may then lodge an appeal of its own. And a case that was thought to be over then drags on for several more years.
Above all, there is one reason why these precautions cannot simply be regarded as mere formalities: innocent people have indeed been sentenced to death. In September 2026, the Death Penalty Information Centre recorded 203 people exonerated and released from death row since 1973 in the United States. Some had spent several decades there before their convictions were overturned. More than half of the exonerations since 2013 have taken at least 25 years.
These figures completely change the way we view the interminable American appeals process. A twenty-year delay seems absurd when the condemned person is indisputably guilty. It seems far less absurd when a man spends twenty years trying to prove that he is not. Convictions have been overturned following the discovery of false testimony, exculpatory evidence that had not been disclosed to the defence, police or judicial misconduct, flawed expert reports, or a seriously inadequate initial defence. The Death Penalty Information Centre estimates that errors committed by state officials feature in a significant proportion of cases that ultimately resulted in a finding of innocence.
There are other causes of delay as well. An execution may be suspended because the planned method is being challenged in the courts. The availability of the drugs used in lethal injections has also given rise to numerous legal and practical disputes. Governors sometimes impose moratoriums. Some state governments decide not to sign any execution warrants for several years. A condemned person may also apply for a pardon or a commutation of sentence from the governor, a relevant commission or, in federal cases, the President.
The situation in the US is, in fact, far less uniform than is often assumed from a European perspective. In 2026, 27 states still legally retain the death penalty, in addition to the federal government and the military justice system. However, a large proportion of the states that still provide for it no longer carry out executions, or do so only very rarely. Two-thirds of US states have either abolished capital punishment or have not executed anyone for at least ten years.
This delay ultimately creates a strange paradox. The United States retains the death penalty in the name of a punishment presented as exceptional and final, whilst at the same time constructing such a cautious and complex legal framework around it that its application can take an entire generation. For the victims’ families, too, these twenty or thirty years of proceedings can mean a succession of hearings, execution dates announced and then cancelled, and the impossibility of truly bringing closure to the case.
And for the condemned person, time takes on an additional dimension. ‘Death row’ often entails an extremely harsh prison regime, with significant isolation and, at times, decades spent awaiting a date that may be set, postponed, and then set again. The psychological consequences of these very long periods of incarceration have themselves given rise to a legal and ethical debate in the United States.
This, then, is one of the fundamental contradictions of the American death penalty: the more a society believes it must have the power to legally kill a condemned person, the more time it must, in theory, take to ensure that it does not kill the wrong person. Yet twenty, thirty or forty years of legal proceedings also reveal something else: when such extensive precautions are required before imposing an irreversible sentence, it may be that the justice system itself is fully aware that it is never infallible.
