AUSTIN, Texas - The number of states that carried out the death penalty fell to a nine-year low in 2002, and several of the states that did administer capital punishment this year carried out fewer executions than the year before, a new study shows.

But bucking the trend was Texas, which almost doubled the number of lethal injections administered in Huntsville this year compared with 2001 and recaptured its status as the nation's most active proponent of the death penalty. Since resuming executions 10 years ago, Texas has administered 289 executions, far more than any other state.

"What we are finding is that the use of the death penalty is becoming more and more concentrated in Texas and a few other states in the South," said Richard Dieter, who heads the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, which examines trends in capital punishment nationwide.

"And increasingly, Texas is finding itself standing alone in its increasing application of the death penalty," Dieter said.

Executions in 2002 declined sharply in Oklahoma, which supplanted Texas last year as the nation's leader when it executed 18 inmates. This year, Oklahoma put to death seven inmates. Missouri saw a slight decline - from seven in 2001 to six this year, as did North Carolina, which went from five to three.

In all, only 13 states sent inmates to the death chamber in 2002, the lowest number since 1993, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Two death penalty states had moratoriums on executions - Maryland since May and Illinois since 2000 - and the federal government executed no one.

Although the total number of executions in the United States increased from 66 last year to 71 this year, the number would have declined had Texas not sharply increased its share from 17 to 33, Dieter said.

But Dudley Sharp, a spokesman for the Texas crime-victims group Justice For All, said Dieter and other death penalty opponents are mistaken if they believe the statistics indicated a lack of public support for capital punishment.

Sharp said that the pace of executions slowed this year because the U.S. Supreme Court decided to take up two landmark death penalty cases - whether states could execute mentally retarded inmates and whether a judge or a jury should decide on the aggravating circumstances that might elevate murder to capital murder.

The high court ruled in June that executing an inmate with mental retardation violates the constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The justices ruled a week later that juries must have a say in determining whether an aggravating circumstance elevates an ordinary murder case to a capital murder case.

Dieter said the two rulings and at least 13 cases in Illinois where death row inmates were wrongly convicted underscore a growing concern over the application of the death penalty, even though most polls show support for capital punishment.

"The death penalty remains broken at the end of 2002," Dieter said, "and the risk of error is intolerably high."

Backers of the death penalty in Texas, including Sharp's organization and Gov. Rick Perry, repeatedly point out that the state has several layers of safeguards designed to prevent an innocent person from being sent to the death chamber.