74 Executions This Year Most Since ’76

The 74 executions carried out in the United States this year represent the highest number of prisoners executed in one year since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, the Justice Department reported. Texas alone carried out 37 executions following a state appeals court decision upholding the death penalty there. Virginia ranked a distant second, but its total of nine was still the highest since 1909, when the state put 17 people to death. The last person to be executed in the nation this year was Thomas H. Beavers, 26, at the Greenville, Va., correctional facility on Thursday for raping and suffocating a 61-year-old widow in 1990. Prisoners executed last year were on death row an average of 10 years and five months, nine months less than those executed in 1995.