ProCon.org made the graphs and charts below using data from M. Watt Espy, Jr. and John Ortiz Smykla’s 32-year study of 15,269 executions performed from 1608-2002 under legal civil authority in the US, or within territories which later became part of the US. The data begins with the first official American execution in 1608 when Captain George Kendall of the Jamestown colony was executed by firing squad for the crime of mutiny. The data ends in 2002 when the study was considered complete. Espy and Smykla gathered data from state Department of Corrections records, newspapers, county histories, proceedings of state and local courts, holdings of historical societies, museums, and other listings of executions. The data were then broken down by 21 different variables such as race, age, jurisdiction, type of violation, crime committed, method of execution, day, month, and year of execution, order of execution, state where execution took place, year of statehood, gender, and occupation of the person executed. The ESPY list is considered the most comprehensive one of its kind, yet it is still incomplete because some executions were not recorded at all, and some records may have been lost or destroyed over time. To view their list of executions in Microsoft Excel format, click on “Executions in the United States, 1608-2002: The ESPY File”.