Death penalty: from the USA to Europe
Justice must not kill. This idea is part of the European legal consensus built around human rights. In the 46 member states of the Council of Europe, no one has been executed since 1997, when the last execution took place in Ukraine. Abolition is today a condition for membership. The exception on the continent is Belarus, outside the Council of Europe, which maintains capital punishment. But this legal consensus coexists with a certain social erosion. According to the 2025 Barcelona Social Values Survey, 35.7% of Barcelona residents believe that the death penalty can be justified always or in some circumstances; among young people aged 15 to 24, the percentage reaches 47%. The trend is not only local. In several countries of the European Union, support for capital punishment is around 50% or higher. In the United Kingdom, in recent months, far-right groups have proposed reinstating it, also appealing to opinion polls. All of this is part of a broader context in which the European populist right advocates for increasingly harsh penal policies.
On the other hand, support for the death penalty in the United States has been declining, from 80% in 1994 to 52% in 2025. But despite this evolution, capital punishment continues to be part of the country's penal reality. We saw this last week, when the State of Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike via a lethal injection of pentobarbital. Pike, convicted of a murder committed more than thirty years ago, survived after receiving two doses of the drug and was taken to a hospital in critical condition. After several days unconscious, she has partially regained consciousness.
Given this fact, it would be a mistake to think that the problem is the failure of the execution method. Any method, no matter how much it is perfected, remains inhumane because the sentence itself is. The difficulties in the application of lethal injection have to do with access to drugs, which many pharmaceutical companies refuse to supply, and with the deontological limitations on the participation of doctors. Paradoxically, it is the method that best hides the violence of the execution. Its clinical appearance makes it seem more humane and favors its social acceptance. In any case, the Trump administration is not concerned with appearances or reducing the violence of capital punishment. On Friday, the Pentagon announced that it will make public the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, a former army major convicted of killing thirteen people in 2009. Thus, the American government now opts for crueler methods and turns the execution into a public spectacle.
Showing off this cruelty, and returning to Pike's case, what is now being raised is whether one can be subjected to an execution again. It will have to be decided, but morally the answer should be negative. Subjecting a person to this process twice adds a level of violence to the sentence that makes it difficult to defend. But the underlying issue is another. No democratic state should arrogate to itself the right to legally kill a citizen. When it does so, it not only puts an end to a life, but also deteriorates the moral value of the institutions that should protect it. There are limits that a democracy cannot cross. Nor does the argument of efficacy support capital punishment, because it has not demonstrated a deterrent effect superior to other penalties.
The global trend regarding the death penalty has a double face. Fewer and fewer countries apply it, but those that maintain it kill more. Amnesty International recorded at least 2,707 deaths in 17 countries in 2025, 78% more than the previous year, without counting the thousands estimated to occur in China. Iran executed at least 2,159, Saudi Arabia 356, Yemen 51, and the United States, an advanced democracy of the 21st century, 47.
In Spain, the last executions of the Franco regime were that of Salvador Puig Antich, killed by garrote in 1974, and those of the five militants of the FRAP and ETA who were executed by firing squad in 1975. The 1978 Constitution abolished the death penalty, and in 1995 the exception provided for wartime also disappeared. The abolition was not just a legal reform, but also the affirmation that, in a democracy, the dignity of the person, even of those who commit monstrous acts, is a right and not a privilege.
It is unsettling that, fifty years after those last executions, a significant part of the citizenry is once again considering capital punishment justifiable. Saturday was the World Day Against the Death Penalty: what has happened to Christa Pike, on the other side of the Atlantic, should revive indignation and dissuade any temptation to bring it back. In Europe, its abolition is one of the great democratic achievements, and we should never turn it into a possibility ever again.