Why People Spend Decades on Death Row Before an Execution Ever Happens

When a person is ordered to death row, it typically takes some time before they are executed. Death row sounds like a final stop, but in the U.S. justice system, it is often the start of a long legal fight. A person lands on death row after a court sentences them to death for a capital crime, usually murder with aggravating circumstances.

Cornell Law School defines capital punishment, also called the death penalty, as a criminal punishment in which the state puts a convicted person to death for a crime. The actual carrying out of that sentence is called an execution.

Death row refers to the prison area where people sentenced to death wait while their appeals, legal challenges, clemency requests, and execution warrants move through the system, per Cornell. But that process usually takes way longer than many people expect.

Death row takes so long because capital cases go through layers of review. Courts treat death as the most severe punishment, so the system gives defendants several chances to challenge their conviction, sentence, trial process, legal representation, and even the execution method.

After sentencing, a death penalty case usually moves into a direct appeal. That appeal looks for major legal mistakes from the trial. Then, the defendant can pursue post-conviction review. During that stage, they may raise issues that did not appear in the trial record, including ineffective assistance of counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, juror misconduct, or newly discovered evidence.

Then, the case can move into federal habeas corpus review, where federal courts examine whether the person’s imprisonment or sentence violates the Constitution.

That process can take years. However, the timeline can stretch even longer when courts overturn a sentence, order a retrial, require resentencing, or pause an execution.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that 2,192 prisoners were under sentence of death at the end of 2023. Those prisoners had spent an average of 22 years on death row, while prisoners executed in 2023 had spent an average of 279 months, or more than 23 years, awaiting execution.

Raymond Riles became one of the clearest examples of how long death row can last. Texas sentenced him to death in 1975 after his conviction in a 1974 murder. He later went through a retrial, resentencing, a near-execution in 1986, and decades of legal limbo tied to mental incompetency. In 2021, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned his death sentence, and he was resentenced to life, per The Texas Tribune.

Carey Dean Moore spent 38 years on Nebraska’s death row before his 2018 execution. According to AP, his case stretched for decades because courts overturned his death sentence, ordered resentencing, reviewed Nebraska’s execution methods, and later dealt with disputes over lethal injection drugs.

Brandon Jones also spent more than 36 years between his first death sentence and his 2016 execution in Georgia. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, courts overturned his first conviction because jurors consulted a Bible during deliberations. Prosecutors retried him in 1997. A jury convicted him again and sentenced him to death again.