World Day Against the Death Penalty, observed on 10 October, comes this year at a time when we are witnessing a serious reversal of the trend seen in previous years, with executions once again on the rise, particularly in some parts of the world. In 2025, Amnesty International recorded at least 2,707 executions in 17 countries, a 78% increase compared with the previous year. In the United States, the only country in the Americas to carry out executions, 47 people were put to death, the highest number since 2009.

This trend has continued in 2026 and, in the United States, has recently taken a dramatic turn. In Tennessee, the attempted execution of Christa Pike, the only woman on the state’s death row, failed after two doses of pentobarbital were administered. Pike was taken to hospital, while the governor suspended all executions scheduled for the rest of the year and ordered an investigation.

In a recent interview with Vatican News, Mario Marazziti of the Community of Sant’Egidio described what happened as a “bankruptcy of the minimum sense of humanity that should guide the actions of any state” and as proof of the failure of the illusion of a painless death penalty. But the issue, Marazziti stressed, goes beyond the method of execution: “the death penalty has no impact whatsoever on people’s safety” and “weakens the social pact which says that the state must always defend life, in every circumstance.”

At a time when executions are once again increasing, the awarding of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay carries particular significance. A former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and current president of the International Commission against the Death Penalty, Pillay has long campaigned for the abolition of capital punishment, stressing the right to life, the irreversible risk of judicial error and the lack of evidence that the death penalty serves as an effective deterrent.

On the eve of 10 October, this recognition is an encouragement to continue, with even greater determination, along the path towards the universal abolition of the death penalty.

When a letter becomes a friendship

Behind executions and statistics, however, there are people, faces and relationships. It is from this conviction that the Community of Sant’Egidio’s commitment has grown since 1995, together with its initiative inviting people to write to men and women on death row. Over the years, around 2,000 pen friends have begun corresponding with death row prisoners in the United States and Africa.

In 2018, Federica Massoli came across one of these invitations on Facebook: “Would you like to correspond with someone on death row?” On the other side was Bryan Frederick Jennings, who had entered Florida’s death row in 1979 at the age of twenty. What began as an exchange of letters became, over the course of eight years, a deep friendship, now told in a podcast by the Community of Sant’Egidio.

A few years earlier, the same invitation had reached Laura Bellotti. In 2012, at the age of seventy, Laura began writing to James Duckett, who was also on death row in Florida. “What began as a correspondence became a great friendship.” Laura would go on to visit him three times in prison. That relationship eventually led to the book The Second Letter.

On 28 July 2026, James Duckett was executed in Florida after spending 38 years on death row. His story, like Bryan’s, brings the statistics on executions back to their most concrete human dimension: behind every death sentence there is a person. And a letter can break through the isolation of death row, build a friendship and reaffirm a dignity that no sentence can erase.