Curiously, in the time of George Dubya, the USA are executing fewer people.
But don’t read about it here, read about it at the Mail & Guardian.
I’ll reproduce my favourite bit of the article to get you interested (emphasis is mine):
Quietly but unmistakably, the anti-death-penalty movement in America has started to win. … How can they be winning when America’s liberals are losing every other culture war? Certainly not by telling anyone that killing people is wrong. The argument they prefer to employ, activists say, is that America is killing the wrong people. Or it’s killing people the wrong way. Or killing them at the wrong price. America just isn’t killing people properly.
The Waffle Group 