Do 2/3 of Americans Really Support the Death Penalty?

A new Gallup poll this week shows that support for the death penalty in the U.S. remains steady at about 65 percent. Is capital punishment impenetrable in the U.S., or are there cracks beneath the surface of this data?

The stats break down in some expected ways, like along party lines -- 81% of Republicans support capital punishment in murder cases while those weakling Democrats break down at 48% for and 47 against. But there are some surprising results here as well.

Despite growing awareness of DNA exonerations and increasing certainty that an innocent person has been put to death, support for executions hasn't dropped in this century. It did plummet in the 90s (from a high of 80% in support of the death penalty in 1993), and the advent of DNA testing could have been a factor in that. But the Gallup poll approached this issue directly, and one-third of Americans said innocent lives are a natural cost of an important punishment. Digging even deeper, of those who said they believed an innocent person was executed in the last five years, 57% support capital punishment.

There are a couple of ways to look at that stat. We could say that death row exonerations have significantly eroded support for the death penalty, or we could say that majority support for capital punishment has  withstood proof of innocence. This is more than an academic point for those following the Cameron Todd Willingham case in Texas (and if you haven't checked in with that case in the last week, there's a lot happening).

Awareness of wrongful convictions has done a great deal to erode support for capital punishment, but it won't be the innocence argument alone that eventually brings the end of the death penalty in this country. Executing guilty people is wrong, too, and though it may not seem like it from the data above, more people agree with me than ever before.

I mentioned above that there might be cracks behind the top-level data. One of those is the alternative of life without parole. When the question was framed as a preference of death over life without parole, only 47% of respondents chose death. I'm convinced that this is just not an issue that people think about often, and they have no sympathy for someone convicted of murder. When we weigh two cruel punishments against one another, I believe humanity wins and we choose life. If this question also incorporated the cost argument (that life without parole costs less to administer than death), the 47% would fall further.

As we approach a state legislative season where several of our legislatures will be considering an end of capital punishment, this news from Gallup may seem difficult to overcome. But the data also shows that many capital punishment supporters aren't considering the alternatives, and they aren't considering the costs.

Capital punishment in the U.S. is both cruel (we're killing the person, we're not doing a good job of making it painless, and we're not always sure they're guilty) and unusual (we're the last industrialized democracy to regularly carry out executions) -- so maybe the Supreme Court will end capital punishment before state legislatures get around to it. But I'm hopeful that several states will consider their budgets and their conscience in 2010 sessions and death sentences will become even more unusual. The Gallup poll only tells part of the story.

[As always, views expressed here are my own, and don't reflect those of any group or organization.]