Idaho’s turn to the firing squad, and the American firing squad’s spread to other states and to federal policy, is easy to read as a purely domestic story. It is worth placing briefly against the global picture, because the international context sharpens rather than softens this book’s argument.
The global trend is toward abolition, not expansion
When Amnesty International began its work against the death penalty in 1977, only sixteen countries had abolished it in law or practice. By the end of 2025 that number had risen to 113, with more than two-thirds of the world’s countries now abolitionist in law or in practice.1 The Council of Europe’s Protocol No. 6, adopted in 1983, prohibits capital punishment in peacetime across its signatory states, and Protocol No. 13, adopted in 2002, extended that prohibition to wartime, effectively eliminating every method of execution, firing squads included, across the European continent with the sole exception of Belarus.2
The countries that still use the method are not a flattering cohort
Contemporary use of the firing squad is concentrated in North Korea, where it has been documented for offenses including the unauthorized viewing of foreign media; China, where it remains available primarily for military offenses; Iran, where shooting is used alongside hanging within a system that executed at least 2,159 people in 2025, its highest recorded total since 1981; and Belarus, the only country in Europe that retains capital punishment at all, where the Soviet-era practice of a single executioner firing at close range remains standard.3 The United States, and specifically the five states this book has profiled together with Florida’s open-ended authorization discussed in Chapter 15, is the only developed democracy currently expanding rather than retreating from this method.
2025 was a record year for executions, and the United States was part of the surge
Amnesty International recorded 2,707 executions across seventeen countries in 2025, the highest figure it has recorded since 1981 and an increase of seventy-eight percent over the 1,518 executions recorded in 2024. That total excludes the thousands of executions Amnesty believes are carried out annually in China, which remains the world’s leading executioner and does not publish figures. Iran accounted for the bulk of the increase, and Saudi Arabia carried out at least 356.4 The United States carried out forty-seven executions in 2025, up from twenty-five the year before and the highest American total since 2009, an increase driven overwhelmingly by Florida’s nineteen.5 Idaho’s transition to the firing squad, and the federal Department of Justice’s April 2026 embrace of the same method, are not occurring against a backdrop of declining American reliance on capital punishment. They are occurring during the steepest increase in American execution activity in more than a decade and a half.
No binding international authority requires the United States to change course
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a party, protects the right to life and directs that capital punishment, where retained, be limited to the most serious crimes.6 The United States is not a party to the optional protocol that would bind it to abolish the practice outright, and nothing in international law currently requires Idaho, South Carolina, or the federal government to abandon the firing squad. I raise the international picture not because it carries direct legal force over the arguments in the preceding chapters, but because it supplies a useful check on any assumption that Idaho’s choice reflects an emerging global consensus about how to modernize capital punishment. It does not. It reflects a choice, made by one of a shrinking number of retentionist democracies, to move in the opposite direction from nearly everywhere else in the developed world.
Notes
011. Amnesty International, Death Sentences and Executions 2025 (2026); Amnesty International UK, “Death penalty report 2025” (noting that the number of abolitionist countries had risen to 113 by the end of 2025).
022. Council of Europe, Protocol No. 6 to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms concerning the Abolition of the Death Penalty (1983); Protocol No. 13 concerning the Abolition of the Death Penalty in All Circumstances (2002).
033. Amnesty International, Death Sentences and Executions 2025 (2026); Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, country profiles for Belarus, China, Iran, and North Korea.
044. Amnesty International, Death Sentences and Executions 2025 (2026); Amnesty International, “Executions surge to highest recorded figure in 44 years,” May 2026.
055. Amnesty International, Death Sentences and Executions 2025 (2026); Death Penalty Information Center, “The Death Penalty in 2025” year-end report.
066. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, art. 6; UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Alarming trends in executions in 2025 raise serious human rights concerns,” January 2026.