Thirty-five people were put to death in 2014, the fewest in 20 years, according to a report last month by the Death Penalty Information Center. All but seven of the executions took place in three states: Texas, Missouri and Florida. And while two-thirds of those executed were black, only six had been convicted of killing a black person, even though blacks make up almost half of all murder victims.

Another sign of the times: Fewer people are put on death row. There were 72 new death sentences in 2014, the lowest number since 1974.

In various decisions, the Supreme Court has helped to reduce these numbers, barring the execution of the mentally ill, the intellectually disabled and those who were minors at the time of their crimes. But states have found ways around those rulings, and have executed many people who fall into one or more of these categories — people like John Errol Ferguson, who was schizophrenic and sat on Florida’s death row for 34 years before he was executed in 2013, and Marvin Wilson, who had an I.Q. of 61 and was executed in Texas in 2012.

A study published last June in the Hastings Law Journal found that of the last 100 people to be put to death, one-third had evidence of an intellectual disability, borderline intellectual functioning or a traumatic brain injury. At least 20 others were diagnosed with or showed symptoms of mental illness, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Others had experienced severe trauma in childhood.

In other words, while the death penalty may be increasingly infrequent, it is all too often a brutal end to a brutal life. The people executed in recent years were not the “worst of the worst” — as many death-penalty advocates like to imagine — but those who were too poor, mentally ill or disabled to avoid it.