While 694 convicted murderers sit on the state's death row, only 13 have been executed since the Supreme Court allowed for reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976.
Amnesty International said in November that at least 63 people had been executed since the start of the year for drug-related offences.
In the United States, 34 people who were known to be mentally retarded have been executed since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, an organization that is opposed to the death penalty.
Pennsylvania ranks high among states that impose death sentences and low among those that carry them out: 208 men and women are on death row, but no one has been executed since 1999; only three people have been executed since the penalty was reinstated in 1976.
"But what happens if you get more of it?" He set the story in Indiana, where 20 men have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977, rather than in Texas, whose 464 executions since 1982 have made it a political lightning rod.
The prosecutor general, Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi, announced on Tuesday that sentences had been "finalized" for 250 detained protesters, with nearly 11 of them sentenced to death — adding to the 9 political prisoners who have been executed since the protests broke out.
But while tens of thousands of people have been executed since the country's first nationwide campaign in 1983, Chinese academics say government statistics show that the Strike Hard campaigns have no lasting impact on crime, belying the effectiveness of a policing strategy whose central feature is forced confessions and death.
