Recognizing that juries in capital cases found discretion in sentencing desirable, Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana afforded their juries this discretion in the 1840s. Finally, the jury could respond to mitigating factors about the crime or the criminal and withhold the death penalty even for convicted first-degree murderers. This development spread, and by 1900 23 states and the federal government had discretionary sentencing in capital cases. Fourteen more states followed in the first two decades of the 20th century, and by 1963 all death-penalty jurisdictions employed discretionary sentencing.