Gallup: Percent of Americans who believe that death penalty is morally acceptable essentially unchanged since 2001

Gallup implies that support is waning.

The results are based on Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs poll, conducted May 8-11. On April 29, an Oklahoma death row inmate given a lethal injection appeared to suffer for an extended period of time until finally dying of a heart attack. That incident led to the postponement of a second execution scheduled in Oklahoma that day and raised questions about the methods used to execute prisoners. 

The case did not fundamentally alter Americans' perceptions of the death penalty, however, with a solid majority viewing it as morally acceptable. This percentage is similar to the 60% who say they favor the death penalty as punishment for murder in Gallup's October update. 

But the longer-term trends reveal that Americans have become less supportive of the death penalty. Gallup first asked the moral acceptability question in 2001, with an average 66% saying it was acceptable between 2001 and the peak in 2006. Over the last three years, the percentage saying it is morally acceptable has averaged 60%. . . .

The Gallup poll was right after Oklahoma "botched" effort.  Another Angus Reid poll showed record support after Boston Bombing. 

78 per cent of respondents (+8 since September 2011) supportthe possibility of prosecutors relying on the deathpenalty for murder cases in the United States.
The poll was conducted after the Boston Marathon bombings and concluded before the massive manhunt that resulted in the arrest of one of the suspects.
Respondents in the South (80%) and West (79%) are more likely to endorse capital punishment, along with supporters of the Republican Party (86%). . . . 

But if you look at the average since 1936, the current poll numbers are almost the same as the average from 1936 through 2012.

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Newest piece at National Review: "Another Round in the Death-Penalty Debate," Correcting mistakes in the Washington Post

On Sunday in the Washington Post, Radley Balko attacked a recent piece that CPRC's John Lott had on the death penalty.  John Lott's piece that responds to Balko starts this way:

The death-penalty debate goes on. After a piece that I wrote about the debate last week, National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke wrote a response, followed later by a much stronger attack by the Washington Post’s Radley Balko.
Cooke’s response was philosophical and drew a distinction between killing someone in self-defense and using the death penalty, though given the evidence that the death penalty deters murders and thus saves lives, that distinction isn’t as clear as he thinks.
Balko, a blogger/reporter for the Washington Post, based his reply on empirical evidence. He puts a lot of faith in studies by death-penalty opponents. Let me address his major points in turn:
-- “It’s important to factor in the severity of the crime. And when a black defendant and a white defendant are convicted of murders with similar aggravating circumstances, the black defendant is significantly more likely to get the death penalty.”
Over the period from 1977 to 2011, the rate of aggravating circumstances for murders was higher for black defendants for murder than it was for whites. Yet, despite that and with whites accounting for fewer murders than blacks (whites commit about 46.8 percent of all murders committed by whites and blacks), whites account for 57 percent of the white and black prisoners sentenced to death for murder.
Finally, even after being sentenced to death at a higher rate than blacks, whites on death row over the decades have had a significantly higher probability of actually being executed than blacks. Over the years from 1977 to 2011, 65 percent of the total number of whites and blacks who have been executed have been white.
This last point is particularly important, since everyone on death row has been convicted of murder with aggravating circumstances. If there is any bias, it is in the opposite direction that Balko claims.
-- “DNA testing has shown that the criminal justice system is flawed — more flawed than most of the public had probably thought. Lott tries to dismiss these concerns, and it’s here that his statistics really get screwy. . . .  I don’t know where Lott gets the number 34. I can’t find it anywhere at the Innocence Project link he provides. The actual number of people convicted of murder who were later exonerated by DNA testing is 104.” . . .

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Is there even one death penalty execution where the DNA shows that a mistake has been made?

Despite the concerns about possible errors in the death penalty and the use of DNA evidence, one thing is very clear: there is not a single case where DNA shows that an innocent person was put to death.  From the Crime Prevention Research Center:

The one modern case that death penalty opponents point to that comes closest to meeting this claim involves Claude Jones Texas, who was convicted in 1989 and executed in 2000. Two pieces of evidence were involved in his trial: the testimony of two accomplice who planned the robbery with Jones and who provided him with the gun used in the killing as well as a hair sample at the scene that turned out to be someone else’s. The fact that the hair at the scene was someone else’s would have meant that piece of evidence could no longer be used to prove that Jones actually went into the store, but the failure of the DNA test to match Jones to the hair does not prove that Jones didn’t do the killing because some many people visited the store it could have been from someone who didn’t commit the murder. The issue here is whether there was still enough evidence with the witness’ testimony and the gun to place Jones at the scene of the crime. . . .

The CPRC has useful discussion on the over all error rate for death penalty cases available here. 

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Newest piece at National Review: "The Shaky Case against the Death Penalty"

My newest piece starts this way:

After the recent mishandled execution in Oklahoma, in which the murderer ended up dying from a heart attack, death-penalty opponents pounced.  

Not surprisingly, the Sunday-morning talk shows focused on whether we should keep the death penalty. ABC News’s This Week was hardly a balanced panel, with four members wanting to abolish the death penalty and the fifth wanting “maybe a halfway point between eliminating it” and what we currently have. 

Let’s analyze the three main arguments made on ABC against the death penalty. 

1. “Support for the death penalty has fallen from 80 percent in 1993 [actually 1994] to 60 percent in 2013.” 

Has support for the death penalty fallen since 1994? Sure, but what ABC News didn’t explain was that the years chosen were carefully cherry-picked. Support for the death penalty in 1994 was the highest ever recorded, according to Gallup. But consider instead all the 43 surveys from 1936 to 2012. Those surveys showed that an average of 63.8 percent of Americans supported the death penalty. Sixty percent in 2013 is down slightly from the average over the preceding 76 years, but it was hardly an earth-shattering change. . . .

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