The latest edition of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's Death Row USA showed a continuing decline in the number of people on death rows across the country. As of January 1, 2013, there were 3,125 inmates under a sentence of death, a decrease of 43 from a year ago. Over the last decade, the size of death row has dropped almost 16%, from 3,703 inmates in 2000 to 3,125 in 2013. California continued to have the largest death row population (727), followed by Florida (413), Texas (300), and Pennsylvania (202). Neither California nor Pennsylvania has carried out an execution in at least 7 years. In Texas, minorities constitute 71% of the death row population. The report also contains information on executions. Nearly 77% of the murder victims in cases resulting in an execution since 1976 were white, even though nationally, about 50% of murder victims are black.
Women Who Kill Men: California Courts, Gender, and the Press examines the role that gender played in the trials of women accused of murder in California between 1870-1958. The authors trace the changing views of the public towards women and how these views may have affected the outcomes of the cases. Some defendants faced the death penalty and were executed; some were spared. Often the public was deeply fascinated with all aspects of the trial and punishment. The book, written by Gordon Morris Bakken and Brenda Farrington, provides in-depth details of 18 murder trials through court records and news coverage. 
In April, the International Commission Against the Death Penalty (ICDP) released a new report titled, How States Abolish the Death Penalty. The report examines the experiences of 13 countries, including Argentina, France, Haiti, the Philippines, South Africa, and 2 states in the U.S. (Connecticut and New Mexico), in their paths to ending capital punishment. The report noted that some states took intermediary steps to abolition, including establishing an official moratorium on executions, reducing the scope of the death penalty, or removing mandatory sentences. The report recommended vigorous public debate on the subject, the publication of information about the use of the death penalty, and the emergence of principled leadership on the issue. The report was released during a recent meeting of the ICDP in Oslo, Norway. 
George F. Will, conservative commentator of the Washington Post, recently drew a lesson about the death penalty from the documentary The Central Park Five, which airs on PBS on Tuesday, April 16. Will wrote, “[T]his recounting of a multifaceted but, fortunately, not fatal failure of the criminal justice system buttresses the conservative case against the death penalty: Its finality leaves no room for rectifying mistakes.” The Central Park Five tells the story of five juvenile defendants (four African Americans and one Hispanic) who were convicted of the 1989 rape and beating of a jogger in Central Park, New York, despite the absence of DNA evidence linking them to the crime. Four of the five gave confessions, which they later said were the result of police intimidation. All were sentenced to prison. In 2002, after a recommendation from the Manhattan District Attoreny, their convictions were vacated. 
A new report from the Death Penalty Project, titled The Death Penalty in Japan, provides an assessment of that country’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), a treaty which both Japan and the U.S. have ratified. While retaining the death penalty is not itself a breach of the treaty, the report states Japan is under an obligation to develop domestic laws and practices that progressively restrict the use of the death penalty. According to the report, Japan has failed to meet the treaty's requirements for fair trials, the provision of adequate procedures for appeal and clemency, and for the humane treatment of persons under sentence of death. The report also explores the quality of opinion surveys in Japan that have reported high public support for the death penalty. 
According to a new report from 
The National Registry of Exonerations has released its latest 
Since the 1990s, almost every death penalty state has experienced a dramatic decline in its annual number of death sentences. DPIC has prepared a series of graphs illustrating this trend in each state: 