Though the death penalty is in serious decline in America, the same is not true worldwide: Amnesty International reports a 54% rise in executions globally in 2015, driven by increases in Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Dang.

A total of 47 prisoners were executed in Saudi Arabia, including a well-known Shiite cleric who had criticized the government and sparked protests in the past.

A man accused of murdering a woman he’d met at a nightclub in 1994 was put to death in Georgia Thursday night, following a series of eleventh-hour attempts to delay his death.

Tomorrow is Veterans Day. Spare a thought for the hundreds of veterans currently sitting on death row somewhere in America.

Slowly but steadily, America is losing its taste for the death penalty. Yesterday’s Supreme Court dissent by Stephen Breyer may go down as a landmark on America’s path to the death penalty’s inevitable abolition.

According to South Korea’s chief spy agency, the head of North Korea’s military was publicly executed by anti-aircraft gun late last month for disobeying Kim Jong Un and falling asleep during a meeting, the BBC reports.

The American Pharmacists Association has put in place an official ban on members participating in lethal injections or other executions, saying "such activities are fundamentally contrary to the role of pharmacists as healthcare providers."

The state of Texas is scheduled to use its last dose of the lethal injection drug pentobarbital on Wednesday, leaving its ability to carry out several upcoming scheduled executions in question. The drug shortage comes too late for some people.

We periodically run letters from death row inmates. Our latest letter comes from an inmate who is now deceased. Arnold Prieto, Jr. wrote us this letter on January 14, one week before he was executed by the state of Texas.

Last week, the state of Texas executed death row inmate Robert Ladd for a 1996 murder. Robert Ladd sent us the following letter shortly before his execution.

The death penalty is slowly losing prominence in America. Botched executions and problems with the supply of drugs has made lethal injection harder to carry out. Still, states are determined to balance out this trend with sheer bloodlust.

The state of Ohio says it is getting rid of its two-drug lethal injection formula, which led to a botched execution last year. Now they'll use one drug that just kills you.

The persistence of capital punishment in some American states is cause for disgust. There is some good news, though: the death penalty is on the decline. These year end numbers prove it.

Last night, two men with intellectual disabilities were put to death.

Robert Wayne Holsey, an intellectually disabled man who was represented at trial by an active alcoholic, is scheduled to be executed at 7 p.m. by the state of Georgia unless the U.S. Supreme Court steps in. His final petition for his life can be seen here.

Last night, Willie Tyrone Trottie, who was convicted of a 1993 double murder, was executed in Texas after spending 20 years on death row. Trottie wrote us a letter earlier this year as part of our "Letters from Death Row" series.

The Guardian US and the Oklahoma Observer filed suit today in an Oklahoma federal court today, demanding greater access to witness executions. They claim a First Amendment right to see more of the procedure, including the IV insertion, which was allegedly botched in Clayton Lockett's execution.

Texas Monthly's Pamela Colloff has a new and excellent story out about a woman who, first as a journalist and then as part of the Texas corrections system's public relations apparatus, witnessed 278 executions. Go read it.

When Louisiana ran out of lethal injection drugs this year, officials announced the state would switch to a new two-drug cocktail. But what they apparently failed to disclose was that the new drugs had been purchased from a hospital that thought it was healing prison hospital patients.

Joseph Rudolph Wood's execution in Arizona on Wednesday afternoon took nearly two hours after the lethal injection began. His lawyers, claiming that their client was gasping and snorting for an hour, filed an emergency appeal to have the execution stopped. Wood died before a court could act.