The StandDown Texas Project

Florida Roundup

Today's Tampa Bay Times publishes the editorial, "Recklessly speeding to execute."

Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Legislature are speeding up executions in an era when other states are slowing them down or repealing the death penalty. The legislation that Scott signed into law Friday puts him on track to be the most active executioner in modern Florida history, in a state that has had more exonerations off death row than any other in the country. The only backstop now is if Scott uses his executive clemency powers to try to avoid future injustices.

The new law addresses a nonexistent problem. The death penalty has had support from governors across party lines. Both Democrats and Republicans have ordered executions, but they were able to do so on a timetable that reflected the unique circumstances of each case. The new law strips away a governor's discretion, requiring him to sign a death warrant within 30 days after the inmate has exhausted his appeals and the executive clemency process is complete. The only bright spot is that some flexibility is retained by the governor since only he can order a clemency review. Scott's general counsel, Pete Antonacci, urged the addition of the clemency provision, a step that adds a safeguard from reckless speed.

No one has a clear picture of whether there are innocent people among the 405 people on Florida's death row, but the state has exonerated 24 prisoners off death row in the last decade — more than any other state. Frank Lee Smith died of cancer on Florida's death row in 2000 after spending 14 years there. A posthumous DNA test found that he had been innocent of the crime and identified the real murderer.

"Timely Justice Act misunderstood by many," is Mark Schlakman's South Florida Sun-Sentinel OpEd.  He's with the Center for the Advancement of Human Rights at Florida State University.

First, I'm not a proponent of Gaetz's Timely Justice Act per se.

While concerns about undue delay in the appeals process shouldn't be ignored they'd be more appropriately addressed within the context of a comprehensive review of Florida's entire death penalty process by all branches of state government to minimize the risk the state might execute innocent people (or others who shouldn't be subject to the death penalty), precisely what The Florida Bar urged state officials to launch in a resolution it adopted in February.

Former Florida Supreme Court Justice Raoul Cantero, appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush, and I sought that position from Bar leadership for nearly two years.

Capitol News Service posts, "Timely or Shameful Justice?"  It's by Mike Vasilinda.

Governor Rick Scott is executing inmates at a higher rate than any Governor of Florida since the death penalty was resumed in 1979. After taking office two and a half years ago, 8 death sentences have been carried out. New legislation to speed up the process even more is drawing both cheers and jeers.

There is also Florida political polling news from a Quinnipiac University poll.

AP coverage is, "Scott's Approval Rating Up But He Still Trails Crist," by Brendan Farrington, via the Lakeland Ledger.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s approval rating is improving, a poll released Tuesday shows, though not to the point that it’s likely to deter any potential challengers in 2014.

The Quinnipiac University poll shows 43 percent of voters approve of the job Scott is doing, compared to 44 percent who disapprove. Meanwhile, 40 percent of voters have a favorable opinion of him compared to 42 percent who have an unfavorable view.

While those numbers aren’t sizzling, they are better than the 36 percent job approval and 33 percent favorable rating that voters gave Scott just three months ago.

The numbers suggest that Scott’s “It’s Working” message, which he’s using to tout Florida’s improving economy, is starting to work.

Still, the Republican governor will have to improve those numbers if he wants to win re-election.

"Gov. Rick Scott gains ground in new statewide poll, but still trails former Gov. Charlie Crist," is by Steve Bousquet for the Miami Herald.

The percentage of voters who have a favorable view of Scott is up to 40 percent, the highest since he took office nearly two-and-a-half years ago. But he has persistent problems with women, who favor Crist by 51 to 32 percent, and Hispanics favor Crist over Scott, 40-33 percent.

Crist’s 13 percent share of Republican crossover votes is slightly higher than Scott’s 8 percent share of Democrats.

Voters still say by a margin of 50 percent to 35 percent that Scott does not deserve to be re-elected, but that too is an improvement over the previous survey in March, when 55 percent said he didn’t deserve a second term and 32 percent said he did.

"It is an indication of how far down Gov. Rick Scott’s numbers have been that he can take some solace from a poll that finds him losing by 10 points to his predecessor in the governor’s office," said Quinnipiac’s Peter Brown. "In addition to cutting the deficit between himself and Crist, Scott sees his tepid job approval and favorability numbers and still-negative re-election numbers as notably improved. That doesn’t mean that happy days are here again for the governor, but if he is going to make a comeback, these are the kinds of steps that would be required."

Flagler Live posts, "Scott Makes Up Some Ground Against Crist and Improves Favorability to Still-Low 40%."

In a match-up against Crist–who has not announced his candidacy in the race–Scott trails, 47 to 37 percent, but that’s a significant improvement from March, when he faced a 16-point deficit in the Quinnipiac poll, and a 12-point deficit in a Public Policy Poll. Scott would also lose against Sen. Bill Nelson, if Nelson were to decide to run for governor. He would beat Scott 48 to 38 percent. Some Democrats are pushing Nelson, who’s had his run-ins with Scott, to run. He was elected to his third U.S. Senate term in November. Florida Democrats gathered for an annual gala last weekend boasted that whoever they would field against Scott would win.

Scott’s numbers have been climbing slowly but rather steadily since his lowest approval rating in May 2011, when it bottomed out at 29 percent, among the worst for any governor in the nation.

Earlier coverage from Florida begins at the link.

Colorado Roundup - Polling, Holmes Case

"What poll means for death penalty," is the title of a Denver Post editorial.

Interestingly, 57 percent of Coloradans said they did not think the death penalty deters murders.

Another revealing statistic: 53 percent said they thought the death penalty was applied fairly in Colorado, despite a mountain of evidence that its use in death-penalty eligible cases is quite arbitrary.

How informed are Coloradans about the death penalty debate? Forty-four percent said they had heard or read "a little" about the debate while 26 percent said they had heard or read "nothing at all."

Only 30 percent said they had heard or read "a lot" on the subject.

Of those Coloradans who did support abolishing the death penalty, the top reason was listed as, "No one has the right to take a life/It's murder." The second most-cited reason was, "Fear of executing an innocent person/Irreversible."

Those seem like pretty good reasons for opposing the death penalty — and there are many more — although apparently they don't resonate with most Coloradans.

We hope the conversation continues and that the governor leads it, polling aside.

Also in today's Post, the news article, "James Holmes' attorneys suggest they might withdraw his insanity plea," by John Ingold.

Attorneys for Aurora movie theater shooting suspect James Holmes have suggested they might withdraw his insanity plea if his upcoming independent psychiatric evaluation doesn't go their way.

This month, Holmes formally pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, prompting the judge to order him to undergo a mental-health evaluation at a state hospital in Pueblo.

Earlier coverage of the Colorado public opinion polling, James Holmes case, and the Nathan Dunlap reprieve begins at the links.

Colorado Public Opinion Polling

The Quinnipiac University Poll Release Detail is at the link.

"Poll: Coloradans back death penalty, disapprove of Dunlap reprieve," is by Chuck Plunkett at the Denver Post.

Coloradans said that the death penalty will be an important factor when they cast ballots in next year's governor's race, and also harbor strong disapproval of the state legislature, according to a wide-ranging national independent poll released Thursday.

In the poll conducted by the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, 74 percent of residents say that the issue over the state's death penalty will be either "very important" or "somewhat important" in a contest where Republicans will be vying to unseat incumbent Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper.

In May, Hickenlooper granted an indefinite reprieve to Nathan Dunlap, a convicted murder who killed four people at an Aurora Chuck E. Cheese in 1993. Dunlap was scheduled to be executed in August.

The poll found that 67 percent of Coloradans disapprove of Hickenlooper's decision to grant the reprieve to Dunlap, compared to 27 percent who approve of it.

"The governor has made it clear that certainly on his watch it doesn't appear anyone is going to be executed in this state, and that's an important point," said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac Polling Institute.

The AP filing is, "Poll shows strong Colorado support for death penalty," by Nicholas Riccardi.  It's via the Coloradoan.

Hickenlooper was a rare Democrat elected during the Republican wave year of 2010, and has positioned himself as a nonpartisan centrist. But he ended up in an increasingly partisan corner after Democrats retook the statehouse in November and muscled through a number of contentious measures, including a package of new gun control laws. That could be taking a toll on Hickenlooper’s ratings. The poll said 49 percent of voters disapprove of the Legislature and only 36 percent approve.

Democrats have won the past three gubernatorial elections in Colorado. The state remains evenly split between Democrats, Republicans and independents. Republicans and independents overwhelmingly support the death penalty, by 87-11 and 73-21 margins, respectively, the poll suggested. Democrats support it more narrowly, 49-41.

The poll indicated voters narrowly approve of Hickenlooper’s performance as governor, 47 percent to 43 percent. But the governor is struggling with independents. Only 44 percent approve while 47 percent disapprove.

The poll of 1,065 registered voters was taken from June 5-11 with live telephone interviews on landlines and cellphones. It has a sampling error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

National Journal posts, "Poll: Tancredo Ties Sliding Hickenlooper in Colorado," by Scott Bland.

Quinnipiac surveyed 1,065 registered voters from June 5-10. The poll's margin of error is plus-or-minus 3 percentage points. Only 24 percent of respondents identified themselves as Democrats, nine percentage points lower than the share that turned out in 2010, according to exit polls. Still, the survey reveals that the governor is suffering with independents, 47 percent of whom disapprove of Hickenlooper, compared to 44 percent who approve. However, Hickenlooper actually lost independents to Tancredo in 2010, despite beating Tancredo by nearly 15 percentage points overall; the Republican ticket led by businessman Dan Maes captured only 11 percent of the vote.

The new poll also suggests it's no stretch to draw a line between Hickenlooper's declining popularity and recent items on his agenda. Hickenlooper granted a temporary death penalty reprieve to convicted murderer Nathan Dunlap in May, saying Colorado's application of the death penalty was "imperfect and inherently inequitable."

But 69 percent of voters say the state should continue having the death penalty as a legal option, and 67 percent said they disagreed with Hickenlooper's decision to grant the reprieve. Tancredo cited Hickenlooper's decision as a main motivator for entering the race again next year.

Meanwhile, 49 percent of the poll respondents said they disapproved of the job performance of the state legislature, which is controlled by Democrats and wrote a number of liberal priorities -- including some contentious ones -- into law this year. A suite of new gun laws caused particular controversy and led to an ongoing recall effort against two Democratic state senators. Hickenlooper did not issue any vetoes in 2013, though he did help scuttle some bills (including a death penalty repeal effort) before they could get to his desk.

"Quinnipiac Finds Strong Colorado Support for Death Penalty, Close Guv Race," by John Tomasic for the Colorado Independent.

Nearly 70 percent of Centennial State respondents told Qunnipiac they would like to retain capital punishment as an option for prosecutors, even though only roughly 50 percent of the voters surveyed believe the death penalty is applied fairly in the state and even though 57 percent say they don’t believe it prevents crime.

Momentum in the U.S. has generally been moving away from capital punishment in recent years. Officials have argued against it as DNA evidence has exonerated defendants who have landed on death row and as repeat studies show death sentences are more frequently meted out in cases featuring poor and ethnic minority defendants.

Colorado Democratic Governor Hickenlooper has drawn fire in the weeks since he granted death row convicted murderer Nathan Dunlap a reprieve. Dunlap gunned down four people in Aurora in 1993. There was never any question about his innocence. Hickenlooper said the reprieve was less about Dunlap than about the fact that the death penalty is unevenly applied in Colorado.

“Our system of capital punishment is imperfect and inherently inequitable,” he said. “Such a level of punishment really does demand perfection.”

The three men currently on the state’s death row all come from Arapahoe County. They are all African American.

Earlier coverage from Colorado begins at the link.  Related posts are in the public opinon polling category index.

Maryland Commentary

"Repealing Maryland's death penalty," is Governor Martin O'Malley's OpEd in Politico.

In Maryland, we govern by results: when a public policy works, we choose to invest in it. On the other hand, when a public policy does not produce results, we invest our limited resources instead in things that are proven to work.

Capital punishment is expensive and the overwhelming evidence tells us that it does not work as a deterrent.

Therefore, rather than continuing to throw taxpayers’ money at an ineffective death penalty, our state has chosen – with bipartisan support – to replace capital punishment with a more effective and cost efficient public policy: life without parole. We are the first state below the Mason-Dixon line to do so, but I believe other states will follow suit.

Capital punishment is not a deterrent, it is not fool-proof, it is administered with great racial disparity, it costs three times as much as life without parole, and there is no way to reverse a mistake when an innocent person is wrongly convicted.

And:

Improving public safety is the most fundamental responsibility of our government. The death penalty does not make us stronger or more secure as a people. It is expensive, ineffective, and wasteful as a matter of public policy; it is unjust as historically applied; and its imperfections can and do result in the occasional killing of innocent people.

That is why, in Maryland, we have replaced the death penalty with the punishment of life without parole.

Baltimore Sun columnist, Dan Rodricks writes, "In death penalty repeal, reason over revenge at long last."

Many of us believe that capital punishment, first used in the Province of Maryland in 1638, should have been relegated to the trash heap long ago. Politicians in Annapolis had overwhelming evidence of its costly and debilitating flaws for many years, but too many refused to attach their names to repeal.

Even in a state where they outnumbered Republicans 2-1, numerous Democrats feared being labeled soft on crime if they voted to end state executions. Indeed, the longtime president of the Senate, a Democrat, offered to personally inject poison into a convicted killer.

That kind of red-meat rhetoric provided the tough-on-crime credits that moderate and middling Democrats nationally were instructed to compile as the party recovered from the Reagan era and the "Willie Horton panic" in 1988. Bill Clinton approved executions while governor of Arkansas. As president, he pushed Congress to expand the federal death penalty to add dozens of categories of felonies, including some crimes that didn't even result in death.

And yet, despite Clinton's cynical political calculus, some Democrats always pushed to get Maryland on the growing list of states that have abolished this immoral and inefficient practice.

The Washington Post WonkBlog posts excellent analyis, "How the media is killing the death penalty."  It's by Danny Hayes.

Many of the states that have abolished capital punishment – including the recent cases of Connecticut, Illinois, New Mexico, New York and New Jersey – are, not surprisingly, among the country’s most liberal.

But the erosion of public support for the death penalty has occurred across the nation, in large part because Americans are conflicted. Many believe capital punishment is justified, but they worry that innocent people might be executed. And as the political debate has in the last two decades focused on wrongful convictions and death row exonerations, Americans have increasingly come to evaluate the death penalty in terms of its potential unfairness.

Although a large majority of Americans – 63 percent in a December USA Today/Gallup poll – say they favor capital punishment, many nonetheless harbor misgivings.

And:

Such ambivalence is not unique to the death penalty. Work by political scientists has shown that people often possess multiple, and competing, attitudes about lots of public policy issues. After 9/11, for example, Americans expressed discomfort with law enforcement activities that seemed to infringe on civil liberties, but many also believed that such activities were justified to protect the nation from terrorism.

But precisely because ambivalence makes people more susceptible to changing their minds, the reframing of the death penalty debate has significantly reduced support for capital punishment.

In “The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence,” political scientists Frank Baumgartner, Suzanna DeBoef and Amber Boydstun found that since the mid-1990s, news coverage of the death penalty has increasingly focused on exonerations and wrongful executions. In earlier eras, the debate in the media was more frequently about other issues, such as capital punishment’s constitutionality or cost.

This shift in media coverage, which has highlighted problems in the death penalty’s application, has encouraged the public to evaluate capital punishment in terms of fairness, especially the potential for innocent people to be sent to death row. As a consequence, Baumgartner, DeBoef and Boydstun find that along with a decline in the U.S. murder rate and other high-profile events (such as former Illinois governor George Ryan’s (R) 2001 mass commutation of death row inmates), negative news drove down support for capital punishment.

The Annapolis Capital Gazette reports, "Death penalty opponents: Repeal ends risk of fatal errors," by Alex Jackson.

By making Maryland the 18th state to repeal the death penalty, state lawmakers hope to avoid a story like Cameron Todd Willingham’s.

Willingham was executed on Feb. 17, 2004, in Texas. After the 35-year-old’s three children died in a fire at his house in 1991, he was accused of arson and convicted for the deaths.

But serious doubts were raised about the scientific proof the house had been burned down deliberately. Before his execution, Willingham said he was innocent.

A year after he was put to death, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. A scientist on the commission concluded investigators had no scientific basis for claiming the fire was arson, according to The New Yorker.

More recent investigations have come up with similar findings in Willingham’s case. His family is still seeking a pardon from the state.

Maryland has had its own experience with death-penalty cases that didn’t stand up to re-examination.

As the green circles outnumbered the red ones on the House of Delegates tally board on Friday, a smile lit up Kirk Bloodsworth’s face. Bloodsworth was once labeled a monster.

Earlier coverage of the Maryland General Assembly's repeal of capital punishment begins at the link.

New North Carolina Public Opinion Polling

The Public Police Polling death penalty survey results are available in Adobe .pdf format.

"Poll: Majority in NC Supports Ending Death Penalty," is by Stephanie Carroll Carson of North Carolina Public News Service.  There is audio at the link.

North Carolina support ending the death penalty in the state, according to a poll released this week. Of the 600 people polled, 68 percent said they would rather the state replace capital punishment with a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

According to Dustin Ingalls, assistant director of Public Policy Polling, the organization that conducted the poll, public opinion appears to be shifting.

"More and more, support for death penalty is decreasing, and that sort of falls in line with opposition on other social issues," he said.

Support for abolishing the death penalty crosses party lines, according to the poll, with even a majority of conservative respondents in favor of ending capital punishment. Another poll result: people said they would rather see the money used to put people to death spent on crime prevention instead.

Tye Hunter, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, said that, while public opinion seems to be shifting, it may take a while for that shift to be reflected in the legislature.

The Charlotte Post reports, "Poll: N.C. residents reject death penalty."  It's written  by Herbert L. White.

North Carolinians would rather have convicted killers pay restitution to their victims’ families if they spend the rest of their lives behind bars, according to a new poll.

A survey by Public Policy Polling found 68 percent of North Carolina residents support replacing the death penalty with life in prison without parole, if offenders are required to work and pay restitution to the families of their victims. A majority of respondents who identified themselves as politically conservative said they favor ending the death penalty and redirecting dollars spent on it to helping victims.

And:

Public Policy Polling surveyed 600 North Carolinians by telephone between Feb. 7-10. Forty-four percent of respondents identified themselves as conservative while 26 percent identified as liberal. The remainder called themselves moderates. The poll revealed:

• 68 percent supported ending the death penalty so defendants could work and pay restitution.

• 63 percent supported ending the death penalty if the money now spent on capital punishment was redirected to crime fighting.

• 55 percent supported ending the death penalty if the money was redirected to solving cold cases and assisting victims

Among conservatives, support for abolishing capital punishment was strongest if offenders were required to pay restitution. Sixty-five percent of those who called themselves “somewhat conservative” and 50 percent of those who were “very conservative” supported switching to life in prison without parole.

“The days when the death penalty enjoyed near-universal support are clearly over. Across the country, poll after poll has shown that,” said Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling. “These results show that people in North Carolina are willing to consider alternatives to capital punishment.”

Earlier coverage from North Carolina begins at the link.  Related posts are in the public opinion polling category index.

Maryland Senate Floor Debate May Come Next Week

Today's Annapolis Capital Gazette reports, "Death penalty repeal vote may not happen until next week," by Alex Jackson.

Gov. Martin O'Malley's bill to repeal the death penalty could wait until next week for a vote by the full Senate.

Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., D-Calvert, said Senate Bill 276 won't be discussed by the chamber until Thursday afternoon, at the earliest.

With debate continuing on O'Malley's gun-control proposal into Thursday morning, Miller said there most likely wouldn't be time for senators to propose amendments to the bill until Friday. The Senate had originally scheduled the start of debate on the death penalty repeal bill for Wednesday.

The Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee last week voted 6-5 to approve the repeal bill, which would make Maryland the 18th state to outlaw capital punishment.

Twenty-four votes are needed to pass a bill in the Senate The bill has at least 25 supporters.

"Poll: Most Marylanders back O’Malley on gun laws but not on repeal of the death penalty," is by Aaron C. Davis and Peyton M. Craighill for the Washington Post.  Infographics on the polling results are also available from the Post.

Marylanders overwhelmingly support Gov. Martin O’Malley’s plan to force gun buyers to submit to some of the nation’s strictest licensing requirements, including fingerprinting and safety training, according to a new Washington Post poll.

But a majority oppose O’Malley’s bid to abolish the death penalty, despite deep skepticism across the state about whether capital punishment is an effective deterrent, the poll found.

The mixed verdict on two of the governor’s leading priorities comes at a key juncture in the 90-day legislative session for O’Malley (D), who is trying to cement his progressive legacy in Maryland as he eyes a possible run for national office in 2016.

Across the state, fully 85 percent back the governor’s licensing plan — the centerpiece of a broader gun-control bill — and 73 percent do so “strongly,” according to the poll.

On Tuesday, the state Senate opened what promises to be several days of contentious debate on the legislation, which would also ban high-capacity ammunition clips and assault weapons — provisions that also enjoy broad support in the Post poll.

And:

Although a majority of Marylanders continue to support the death penalty, some of the arguments O’Malley is making appear to resonate.

By nearly 2 to 1, those polled say that the death penalty is not a deterrent to murder and does not lower the murder rate. And most who responded that way say they feel strongly about their view.

Moreover, nearly one-third of Marylanders — including nearly half of African Americans — say capital punishment has been applied unfairly in the state. That’s another argument O’Malley has advanced in a state where five men sit on death row but no executions have taken place since 2005.

Yet even when those arguments are stated explicitly — as well as questions that critics have raised about the morality of capital punishment — support for repeal is tepid among the public.

The Post also reports, "In Maryland, five wait on death row," by Theresa Vargas.

Vernon Lee Evans Jr. should have been dead by now. A prosecutor did his best to ensure that when he convinced a Maryland jury that Evans was among the worst of the worst, a killer who deserved a punishment more severe than a life spent in prison. He deserved, the prosecutor argued and the jury agreed, to die at the hands of the state.

That was nearly 30 years ago.

In the years since, the motel where Evans gunned down two employees has been replaced by a Howard Johnson. The star witness in the case, a woman who lost her husband and a sister that day, has died. And Evans, who in his own words has “rebuilt” his character, remains on Maryland’s death row, kept alive in a politically forged purgatory.

“In hindsight, it would have been better if he got life without parole,” David B. Irwin, the former prosecutor who handled the case, said recently. “But it wasn’t obvious to us as young prosecutors back then that this was the way it was going to turn out.”

As the state Senate prepares to vote this week on whether Maryland should abolish capital punishment, the Evans case illustrates what can happen when the death penalty exists but is not enforced.

Unlike Virginia, which has executed more than 100 people since 1976, including one man last month, Maryland has executed five people since it reinstituted the death penalty in 1978, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. No one has been executed in Maryland since 2005.

What is essentially a moratorium on capital punishment has been in place in Maryland since 2006, and since 2009, the state has required DNA evidence, a videotaped crime or a videotaped confession in capital cases.

Earlier coverage from Maryland begins at the link.

Lethal Injection Update From Kentucky - Updated

"Change in execution method set to go into effect," is the AP report written by Brett Barrouquere.  It's via the Lexington Herald-Leader.

At least three Death Row inmates could be nearing execution as Kentucky moves toward a new lethal injection method.

Execution requests for two of the condemned men were made to the governor's office in 2010, but a judge barred the state from carrying out any executions until it switched to something other than a three-drug lethal injection method.

The state has revamped its method and now must go before Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd to ask for the suspension to be lifted. Until then, the governor can't take any action toward carrying out a death sentence.

Requests have already been made to execute Robert Karl Foley, 56, convicted of six murders in Madison and Laurel counties, and Ralph S. Baze, 57, condemned for shooting and killing a sheriff and deputy in 1992.

Also, 51-year-old Benny Lee Hodge's appeals based on the trial record have run out in the August 1985 slaying of Tammy Acker, whose father was robbed of $1.9 million in Fleming-Neon in Eastern Kentucky.

Kentucky is implementing lethal injection by one or two drugs, depending upon their availability. The change, which takes effect Friday, brings Kentucky in line with at least seven states using the single-drug execution protocol.

Should Shepherd allow executions to go forward, the state can then begin reviewing cases and purchasing the necessary drugs. A public records request in January by The Associated Press showed that Kentucky had not yet purchased the drugs needed.

And:

The revised regulations specify that doses of the drug used in the one-drug execution — 3 grams of sodium thiopental or 5 grams of pentobarbital — be repeated if the inmate has not died within 10 minutes.

In a two-drug execution, the warden may authorize continued injections of 60 milligrams of hydromorphone until the inmate dies. Kentucky previously used sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride.

Shepherd's ruling halting all lethal injections came as the state prepared to execute Gregory L. Wilson, 56, for the 1987 rape, kidnapping and murder of 36-year-old Debbie Pooley in Kenton County. Wilson has since won a hearing in state court on whether he is mentally disabled and ineligible for execution.

Public defender David Barron, who represents several Death Row inmates, said he plans to challenge the new method.

Kentucky has executed three men at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, the last one in November 2008.

The Huntington Herald-Dispatch reports, "Ky. officials: State ready to resume executions."

Kentucky is ready to resume executions because a new one- or two-drug lethal injection method that took effect Friday addresses concerns by inmates that the previously used three-drug mixture amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, prosecutors said.

In a notice filed in Franklin Circuit Court, the Kentucky Attorney General’s office told Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd that the method should cancel out any arguments made by the condemned inmates.

Prosecutors want a final ruling from Shepherd that would lift his order that stopped executions in Kentucky.

The revised regulations that went into effect Friday specify that doses of the drug used in the one-drug execution — 3 grams of sodium thiopental or 5 grams of pentobarbital — be repeated if the inmate has not died within 10 minutes.

Earlier coverage of Kentucky lethal injection issues begins at the link.  Additional coverage from Kentucky is available at the links.  There is currently a de facto moratorium on executions in the state because of the lack of a lethal injection protocol.

Also, from Kentucky, the Louisville Courier-Journal reports, "Two-thirds of Kentuckians want to keep death penalty," by Jessie Halladay.

About two-thirds of Kentuckians support the death penalty as an option for murderers and do not want it replaced with a sentence of life in prison without parole, according to the latest Courier-Journal Bluegrass Poll.

Two bills have been proposed in this year’s General Assembly — one in the Senate and one in the House — to abolish the death penalty.

About 67 percent of the 609 registered voters surveyed said they support capital punishment in Kentucky, while 26 percent said they’d like to see it abolished. Another 7 percent of those polled said they were not sure about the issue.

New Maryland Polling

The Gonzales Reserarch Maryland poll is available in Adobe .pdf format.

The Washington Post reports, "Md. voters open to life without possibility of parole, new poll finds."  It's by John Wagner.

The poll found that 49 percent of Marylanders support the death penalty while 44 percent oppose it. Opposition has grown by 8 percentage points in the last two years.

More striking, Gonzales said, is the finding that 61 percent of voters say life without parole is an acceptable alternative to the death penalty, while only 33 percent say it is not.

The bill O’Malley has introduced would replace capital punishment with life in prison without parole. If passed by the legislature, voters could have the final say if opponents gather sufficient signatures to put the issue on the ballot.

The poll put O’Malley’s own approval rating at 54 percent.

"Poll shows Obama, O'Malley approval remains strong," is Michael Dresser's Baltimore Sun report.

The Gonzales poll became the second this month to show strong support for an assault weapons ban, as proposed by O'Malley. The margin of approval was 58 percent to 40 percent, slightly narrower than one released by OpinionWorks the previous week.

Like the previous poll, the Gonzales survey showed that Maryland voters narrowly support the death penalty, though by a shrinking margin. This month, voters expressed approval of capital punishment by 49 percent to 44 percent. The 5-point margin compares with a 20-point margin two years ago. O'Malley is supporting a repeal of the death penalty.

While the Gonzales poll's overall result on the death penalty is close to that of OpinionWorks, it differs on how it reaches that conclusion. Gonzales' survey showed strong opposition to the death penalty among black voters and heavy approval among whites. OpinionWorks showed little difference between the races.

Unlike OpinionWorks, Gonzales asked whether Marylanders considered life without the possibility of parole an acceptable substitute for the death penalty. Voters said they did by a margin of 61 percent to 33 percent. Supporters of repeal have proposed that life without parole take the place of capital punishment.

WBAL-TV posts, "Gonzales poll finds opposition to death penalty growing."

One of the governor's top priorities of the legislative session includes abolishing the state's death penalty. The poll finds opposition to the death penalty in Maryland has grown 8 points over the past two years.

Statewide, the poll finds 49 percent of voters favor the death penalty -- 29 percent of which strongly favor it -- and 44 percent oppose the death penalty -- 31 percent of which strongly oppose it.

Of those polled, 60 percent of Democrats oppose the death penalty, and 77 percent of Republicans support it. Of Independents, 51 percent said they favor the death penalty and 38 percent said they oppose it.

The poll also found a near 2-to-1 result when asking whether life without parole is an acceptable substitute to the death penalty. Sixty-one percent said it is an acceptable alternative, while 33 percent said it is not.

"Death penalty repeal picking up steam in state," at Southern Maryland Newspapers Online, by C. Benjamin Ford.

Maryland voters support a ban on the sale of assault weapons in the state and background checks on people buying guns at gun shows, and approve of the job Gov. Martin O’Malley has done as governor, but do not want him to run for president in 2016, according to a new state poll.

Also, support for the death penalty seems to be slipping over time in Maryland, although 49 percent still favor retaining the death penalty, including 29 percent who strongly favor it. Meanwhile, 44 percent oppose the death penalty, including 31 percent who strongly oppose it, the poll shows.

Two years ago, 56 percent of Marylanders favored the death penalty, while 36 opposed it, according to the polling data.

“The biggest surprise was the eight-point pickup in the opposition to the death penalty,” said pollster Patrick E. Gonzales, of Annapolis-based Gonzales Research & Marketing Strategies.

Earlier coverage from Maryland begins at the link; also available, earlier Maryland public opinion polling. 

Related posts are in the public opinion polling category index.

Maryland Polling

Today's Baltimore Sun reports, "Marylanders strongly support gun control proposals, poll finds; State voters divided over death penalty repeal."  It's by Michael Dresser.

A new poll shows Marylanders strongly support two gun control measures that Gov. Martin O'Malley has suggested he might ask the General Assembly to pass in the wake of last month's elementary school massacre in Connecticut.

On another measure the governor supports — repeal of the death penalty — the state's voters are divided.

The poll of 800 registered voters, taken by the Annapolis-based firm OpinionWorks and released to The Baltimore Sun, shows overwhelming majorities favor banning the sale of assault weapons in Maryland and limiting the number of bullets a gun's magazine can hold.

And:

The death penalty issue is likely to be particularly hard-fought and could be decided by a margin of one or two votes in the state Senate. Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller has promised a floor vote if the governor can muster enough support to pass a bill in that chamber.

The poll showed Marylanders are against repeal by a margin of 48 percent to 42 percent, but the margin has been narrowing in recent years.

Sen. Lisa A. Gladden, a Baltimore Democrat who has led the fight for repeal, said the poll numbers are more favorable to her cause than in the past.

"What it says, at least to me, is we're moving toward repeal," Gladden said. "These are the highest, closest numbers we've ever seen saying they support repeal."

Jane Henderson, executive director of Maryland Citizens Against State Executions, said that when pollsters ask people another question — whether they would support life without parole as an alternative to execution — they routinely say yes by margins of 60 percent or more.

Some voters tend to support capital punishment in the abstract, Henderson said.

Related posts are in the public opinion polling category index.  Earlier coverage from Maryland begins at the link.

New Polling From Gallup

"U.S. Death Penalty Support Stable at 63%; Decade-long decline in support after 2001 seen mostly among Democrats," is the title of the summary report from Gallup on its latest polling.  It's written by Lydia Saad.  Here's the beginning:

Americans' support for the death penalty as punishment for murder has plateaued in the low 60s in recent years, after several years in which support was diminishing. Sixty-three percent now favor the death penalty as the punishment for murder, similar to 61% in 2011 and 64% in 2010.

Gallup first asked Americans for their views on the death penalty using this question in 1936, and has asked it at least annually since 1999. The latest results come from a Dec. 19-22, 2012, USA Today/Gallup survey, conducted in the first few days after the Newtown, Conn., school shooting massacre.

Although views on the death penalty have been fairly static since 2010, support has been gradually diminishing since the high point in 1994, when 80% were in favor. By 2001, roughly two-thirds were in favor, and since then it has edged closer to 60%.

"Poll: 6 in 10 Americans favor death penalty," is by JoAnne Viviano for the Columbus Dispatch.

A poll released this week shows 63 percent of Americans favor the death penalty for murder convictions.

The results of the 2012 USA Today/Gallup poll of about 1,000 adults are similar to findings from 2011, when 61 percent of respondents favored capital punishment, and 2010, when 64 percent were in favor of the practice. 

The most current poll was conducted by phone from Dec. 19-22, within days of the Newtown, Conn., shooting spree that claimed the lives of 28 people, including 20 elementary school children. It has a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.

Gallup has polled Americans on the death penalty since 1936, when 59 percent agreed with the practice. Support peaked at 80 percent in 1994 and hit a low of 42 percent in the 1960s.

Related posts are in the public opinion polling category index.

Tulsa World's Lethal Rejection

That's the original title of Julie Delcour's editorial column in the Tulsa World, "Death penalty not living up to expectations."

Here's where capital punishment stands in America: 33 states and the federal government authorize it. Gallup and Pew Research Center polls show public support at above 60 percent. So reports that the death penalty is on its death bed are exaggerated, or are they?

Since 2005, five states have abolished the death penalty and California came close to doing so in November, Proposition 34 losing by four percentage points. Nearly 35 years ago, a law reinstating the death penalty there passed by 82 percent. In the years since, the death penalty has cost the state about $4 billion and California has not carried out a single execution in seven years and only 13 since the law went into effect.

Last fall, for the first time in its 155-year history, the Sacramento Bee opposed the death penalty editorially, calling it "an illusion," and saying:

"We need to end the fiction - the sooner the better. The state's death penalty is an outdated, flawed and expensive system of punishment that needs to be replaced with a rock-solid sentence of life imprisonment with no chance of parole."

More evidence that a gradual retreat from the death penalty is under way can be found in the number of new inmates added to state death rows. In 2000, 224 defendants received a death sentence compared with 77 in 2012, the second lowest since the death penalty was reinstituted in 1976.

And:

But not in Oklahoma, which, with 102 executions since 1976, has the highest number of executions per capita in the nation, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center. Texas leads the nation in executions with 493, trailed by Virginia, 109, and then Oklahoma.

Earlier coverage from Oklahoma begins at the link; also available, earlier coverage of the DPIC report.

New Field Poll Leads California Roundup

I am catching up with several days worth of California items.  Let's begin with breaking news released this morning.  In the next post, I'll link to editorials, OpEds, and other recent commentary.

California's Capitol Weekly posts, "For first time, backers outnumber foes in repealing death penalty," written by Mark DiCamillo and Mervin Field.

The latest Field Poll finds that for the first time supporters outnumber opponents of Proposition 34, the statewide ballot initiative to repeal the death penalty and replace it with life in prison without parole. Currently 45% of this state’s likely voters are voting Yes while 38% are voting No. But, a relatively large 17% remain undecided.

One of the factors propelling the increase in support of the initiative relates to the growing perception that the death penalty is more expensive to administer than housing a person in prison
for life. When asked about this in the current survey, 53% of likely voters now say the death penalty is more expensive than life in prison, while 31% think it is more expensive to house a convicted felon for life. This represents a significant change in voter opinion compared to past Field Poll measures. A September 2011 Field Poll found slightly more believing life in prison was more expensive than the death penalty (43% to 41%), while in 1989 greater than a two to one majority felt this way (54% to 26%).

The complete Field Poll survey is available in Adobe .pdf format.

The AP report is, "Poll: Support up for ending Calif. death penalty," by Don Thompson.  It's via the CT Post.

Support is growing to end California's death penalty, but backers of an initiative on Tuesday's ballot still lack the majority needed to pass it, according to a Field Poll released Friday.

The survey found that 45 percent of likely voters support Proposition 34, which would end executions in favor of life imprisonment without parole, even for murderers already on death row. Thirty-eight percent oppose the measure, while nearly 1 in 5 voters remains undecided.

Support increased by 4 percentage points since a previous tracking poll was conducted in mid-October.

"They have a chance. It looks better than a few weeks ago because it's trending in their direction," said Field Poll Director Mark DiCamillo.

But he said supporters of the initiative need undecided voters to lean their way if the measure is to prevail. Historically, most late-deciders have tended to vote "no."

"Field Poll shows measure to end death penalty gaining, but still lacking 50%," is the Sacramento Bee report by Sam Stanton.  There is a graphic at the link.

With concern over the cost of capital punishment rising, California voters may be poised for a historic vote to abolish the state's death penalty, a new Field Poll indicates.

Support for the measure, Proposition 34, remains below 50 percent. But the poll released this morning found 45 percent of likely voters favor replacing the punishment with life in prison, while 38 percent oppose doing away with capital punishment.

Another 17 percent say they remain undecided.

"Calif. death penalty opponents say it's too costly," is an AP roundup of the California debate written by Paul Elias.

Death penalty opponents in California are trying a new argument this year: Abolish capital punishment because the perpetually cash-strapped state just can't afford it.

Voters in the state with the nation's largest death row will decide Tuesday whether to repeal the death penalty. Proponents of Proposition 34 say incarceration and litigation costs are too high for too little return.

California has spent about $4 billion since capital punishment resumed in 1977, yet just 13 inmates have been put to death.

An independent analysis says the state would save between $100 million and $130 million a year by converting death sentences to life-without-parole, money supporters say could be put toward public schools and local law enforcement investigations.

"The death penalty is a giant rathole where so much of California's budget is thrown with no discernible benefit," said Dionne Wilson, whose husband, a police officer, was killed by a man now on death row.

A supporter of Proposition 34, she said the death sentence given to her husband's killer "didn't change anything. I still don't have a husband and my children and family are devastated."

Opponents say the argument is merely a smoke screen by the American Civil Liberties Union and other longtime opponents of capital punishment.

The Los Angeles Times is providing intense coverage by it reporter Maura Dolan, including, "Serial killer's lone survivor torn by conscience," about Rose Steward who support Prop. 34.  Doaln also writes, "Many death row inmates oppose bid to halt executions,"

A federal appeals court Monday overturned the death sentence of California’s longest serving death row inmate on the grounds that his defense lawyer failed to investigate and present mitigating evidence during the penalty phase of his murder trial.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals decided 2-1 that Douglas R. Stankewitz, convicted of murdering Theresa Greybeal in Fresno in 1978, should be re-sentenced to life without possibility of parole unless prosecutors retry the penalty phase of his murder case.

Death penalty trials are divided into two parts. The jury first decides whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty. If guilt is established, the jury then decides whether to recommend a death sentence or life without parole.

The 9th Circuit majority said Stankewitz’s lawyer presented only a “paltry” amount of evidence in trying to persuade jurors against a death sentence, ignoring extensive documentation of the defendant’s “deprived and abusive upbringing,” potential mental illness, long history of substance abuse and use of drugs leading up to the murder.

The Guardian reports, "California campaigners hope to see death penalty abolished on election day."  It's written by Ed Pilkington.

Finally in this news roundup, let me point to one article on one case that has nothing and everything to do with Prop. 34.  It is, "Death sentence of state's longest-serving death row inmate overturned," from the October 30 edition of the Los Angeles Times, also by Maura Dolan.

 

In the next post, editorials, OpEds, and additional commentary on Prop. 34.

Earlier coverage of Prop. 34, the SAFE California ballot initiative, begins at the link; also available, more on Prop. 34 at SAFE Caliornia.

Support for Prop. 34 'Surging' in Latest Polling - California Roundup

Today's Los Angeles Times reports, "Support for end to California death penalty surges."  It's written by Maura Dolan and Jack Leonard.  There are graphs at the link.

Voter support for a ballot measure to repeal California's death penalty has jumped dramatically, though not enough to ensure its passage, a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll has found.

Support for a separate measure that would ease the state's three-strikes sentencing law remained high, with more than 60% in favor of amending it.

The survey, conducted last week, showed that the gap between supporters and opponents of Proposition 34, the capital punishment measure, is now very small — only 3 percentage points — compared with last month. Still, less than half of respondents said they would vote for the measure, which would replace the death penalty with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Forty-two percent said they would vote for Proposition 34, with 45% saying no. In September, the gap was 38% to 51%, a 13-point difference. A significant 12% of respondents said they did not know how they would vote, nearly identical to the 11% who had not decided last month.

"There is no question there has been a sharp shift," said Dan Schnur, who heads the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. The results suggest that passage is "not impossible" but still "very difficult," Schnur said.

When voters heard more information about Proposition 34, such as its financial ramifications and details of the effect on prisoners, responses flipped: 45% were in favor and 42% against — still very close to the survey's margin of error, which is 2.9 percentage points.

The latest USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences/Los Angeles Times poll questioned 1,504 registered voters by telephone from Oct. 15 to Oct. 21, before the Proposition 34 campaign launched radio and television ads. Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a Democratic firm, did the survey with American Viewpoint, a Republican company.

The Long Beach Gazette joins a clear majority of California newspapers supporting repeal with the editorial, "Yes On Prop. 34 Vote Common Sense Here.

California’s death penalty doesn’t work and should be repealed.

That’s the premise of Proposition 34 on the Nov. 6 ballot, and we agree.

"Former executioners say it's time to kill the death penalty," is by Jose Gaspar of KBAK/KBFX-TV.

Jerry Givens is no stranger to the death penalty. As former chief executioner for the state of Virginia, Givens executed 62 convicted criminals.

"I carried out 37 executions by lethal injection and 25 by electrocution," said Givens on Wednesday night.

Givens, along with fellow former executioner and warden Ron McAndrew, of Florida, were in Bakersfield as guest speakers advocating for the passage of Proposition 34 on California's November ballot.

Like Givens, McAndrew also carried out executions, but has since come to oppose the death penalty.

"I supported it through ignorance," said McAndrew.

The New Republic reports, "California Voters Get a New Reason to Abolish the Death Penalty," by Maurice Possley, the former award-winning Chicago Tribune journalist, now with the National Registry of Exonerations.

When California voters check off their ballots next month, they’ll have the opportunity to make their state the eighteenth in the nation to abolish the death penalty. So far, proponents of the abolition ballot measure, Proposition 34, have stressed the $130 million the state could save each year by changing the maximum sentence to life without parole as well as the $100 million that would be set aside for law enforcement to work on unsolved crimes.

However, there’s a more direct reason for abolition: More defendants have been wrongfully convicted and exonerated in California than any other state in the nation -- indicating significant risk of putting an innocent person to death.

Until recently, we didn’t know that this was the case. At the National Registry of Exonerations, where I work as an investigator and writer, Illinois originally held the dubious distinction of having the most exonerations, with 111 since 1989. In September, however, California overtook it. The California count now stands at 120 exonerations since 1989.

Meanwhile, today the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and Hollway Advisory Services, a criminal justice research firm, announced the launch of the California Wrongful Convictions Project, an effort dedicated to identifying wrongful convictions in California and assessing their economic impact.

“Wrongfully convicted Californians have spent more than 1,300 years in prison, costing taxpayers more than $129 million for unnecessary incarceration and compensation,” the Project announced in a press release.

NPR Morning Edition has featured two reports on Prop. 34, "Calif. Death Penalty Opposition Focuses On Economy," by Richard Gonzales; and, "In Calif., A Death Penalty Proponent Changes Course."  Both links feature audio.

"Prop 34: Ex-San Quentin Prison Warden Jeanne Woodford Backs California Measure to End Death Penalty," is the Democracy Now report, featuring video.  A transcript of the interview is also available.

Ron Briggs, an El Dorado County Supervisor, posts, "Why Conservatives Like Bill O’Reilly and Me Support Proposition 34," at the Fox and Hounds blog.

Bill O’Reilly is the newest endorser of Proposition 34, the initiative that will replace the death penalty with life in prison without possibility of parole and make inmates work and pay restitution (rather than sit in private cells without doing anything, as they now do).

It might be surprising to some that O’Reilly, a political commentator on Fox News, a national leader among traditional thinkers, supports Prop 34. But a look at California’s death penalty shows why: California’s death penalty is simply a fiscal disaster that coddles criminals, enriches lawyers, and hurts victims.

Much like O’Reilly, I used to support and even champion the death penalty. In 1978, my father, Senator John Briggs, proposed an initiative to expand California’s death penalty and I proudly worked on the campaign. The voters passed the Briggs Death Penalty Initiative by an overwhelming margin. We were sure we were helping victims and we didn’t pause when the Legislative Analyst Office said the fiscal impacts of the initiative were “unknown.” It seemed obvious: the death penalty would cost less than life in prison without parole.

We were wrong.

Today's Guardian's publishes, "California's death penalty ballot: Prop 34 makes economic and ethical sense," by Ken Macdonald and Gil Garcetti.

This year, California's death row will cost taxpayers $184m. What will the state get for that price? The same number of executions as last year, and the year before that, and every year since 2006: zero.

A solution has been offered: the state's worst offenders would die in prison of natural causes, just as they are doing on death row today – only now, taxpayers would save $130m a year. That is Proposition 34, the ballot initiative to replace the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole as the state's maximum sentence for murder.

The economic benefit may not be obvious. After all, many people don't know that the death penalty is far more expensive than life in prison with no chance of parole. Voters are surprised to learn that every death row inmate comes with a lifelong team of lawyers, is housed to one cell and automatically gets extra security, and even extra visiting hours. Most often, death row inmates die of old age. It all adds up to a very large tab for no useful purpose.

The one thing about the death penalty everyone agrees on: the system is broken beyond repair. There is simply no other way to describe spending nearly $1bn over six years in order not to execute a single one of the 726 prisoners currently on death row.

Earlier coverage of Prop. 34, the SAFE California ballot initiative, begins at the link;

Montana Public Opinion Polling

The Sunday Biliings Gazette reported, "Gazette state poll: Voters say keep death penalty, relax environmental regulations," by Mike Dennison.  There are charts at the link.

A solid majority of Montanans oppose repealing the state’s death penalty, and a majority favors relaxing environmental law to encourage more coal, oil and gas development in the state, a Gazette state oll shows.

And:

By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, Montanans surveyed opposed repealing the state’s death penalty for certain crimes, as 57 percent opposed repealing the penalty and 30 percent supported repeal. Thirteen percent were undecided.

The Montana Legislature, in recent sessions, has rejected bills that would repeal the death penalty and replace it with life in prison without parole. Montana has only two convicted murderers on death row.

Earlier coverage from Montana begins at the link.  Related posts are in the public opinion polling index.

New Field Polling in California

Today's Sacramento Bee reports, "Field Poll shows voters closely divided on death penalty."  It's by Sam Stanton.

California voters are now divided over whether to repeal capital punishment through a measure on the Nov. 6 ballot, a new poll has found.

Among likely voters, 42 percent would repeal the death penalty and replace it with life without possibility of parole, while 45 percent would retain death as a punishment, the survey by the Field Poll and the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley found.

The survey found 13 percent of likely voters still undecided, giving interest groups on both sides of the measure incentive to press their cases through Election Day.

The survey, which measures support for Proposition 34, follows a Field Poll last year that also found softening support for the death penalty. In that poll, 48 percent said they preferred that someone convicted of first-degree murder be given life without parole, while 40 percent supported the death penalty.

"Death penalty repeal close in poll," by Bob Egelko in the San Francisco Chronicle.

California voters are closely divided on a November ballot measure to repeal the state's death penalty law, with significant differences in support among regions and age groups, a new Field Poll reports.

The survey found that Proposition 34, which would make life in prison without parole the maximum punishment for murder, was opposed by 45 percent of likely voters and favored by 42 percent, with 13 percent undecided. The results amounted to a statistical tie, since the poll's margin of error was 4.3 percentage points.

The poll, released Tuesday, was conducted Sept. 6-18 among a random sample of 468 voters.

"FIELD POLL: Narrow percentage favors blocking death penalty abolition< by Richard K. DeAtley for the Riverside Press-Enterprise.

Voters are narrowly divided over Prop. 34, an initiative to do away with the death penalty in California, according to a UC Berkeley/Field Poll survey made public Tuesday, Sept. 25. Those favoring the ballot measure are at 42 percent, those opposed at 45 percent, with 13 percent undecided, the poll reported.

The difference is within the poll’s 4.3 percentage point margin of error.

The initiative calls for the abolition of the death penalty in California and is retroactive for the state’s condemned inmates, whose numbers now stand at 727, the largest such number in the country. If passed, the initiative will replace capital punishment with a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole, and directs $100 million to law enforcement for investigation of murder and rape cases.

The results, Field Poll Director Mark DiCamillo said in a phone interview, reflect changing attitudes about capital punishment in California. The Field Poll has conducted surveys on the death penalty for more than 50 years.

Changes include an increasing number of voters accepting that a sentence of life in prison without parole means just that, life in prison, rather than eventual release. Voters also are migrating from viewing life in prison without parole as more expensive than the death penalty to an increasing regard that capital punishment is more costly, DiCamillo said.

In 2000, surveyed voters in the Field Poll favored the death penalty over life in prison without parole, 44 percent to 37 percent. In a 2011 poll, 48 percent said they preferred life in prison without parole against 40 percent for the death penalty, even though 68 percent overall said they favored the death penalty.

“I don’t see those as inconsistent answers,” DiCamillo said. “For first-degree murders, most prefer life in prison without parole. But for heinous crimes — put Charlie Manson’s face up there — many voters would say the death penalty should be kept.” Voters have indicated they want prosecutors to have capital punishment as an option, he said.

Also, today, the Los Angeles Times publishes the editorial, "Prop. 34 and death penalty dishonesty: Foes of the measure make it sound as though it would set killers free."

We stopped being shocked by flagrantly dishonest campaign claims long ago, but sometimes the disingenuousness is so flagrant that it still gets our blood boiling — especially when it happens in lower-profile political races in which campaign managers are figuring that fact-checkers won't bother to call them out. Such is the case with the No on Proposition 34 campaign.

Proposition 34, which this page endorsed in May, would eliminate the death penalty in California and replace it with a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Yet the "no" side seems determined to make it sound as if the measure is about setting killers free.

"Prop. 34 lets serial killers, cop killers, child killers, and those who kill the elderly, escape justice," the campaign says on its website. "Proponents don't acknowledge that when California's death penalty was eliminated before, condemned criminals were released only to rape and kill again! Voters had to restore capital punishment to restore justice."

First, Proposition 34 doesn't let anyone escape justice: Instead of being executed, death row inmates would spend the rest of their lives in prison. Second, the implication that the measure would free people to kill again is offensive and untrue.

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional. At that time, there was no such sentence as life without parole; death row inmates were instead given life sentences, meaning they were eligible for parole hearings. Some death row inmates in California were indeed set free as a result, and one, Robert Lee Massie, committed murder after being paroled in 1978. Yet that has nothing to do with Proposition 34, which bars death row inmates from parole, meaning no repeat of the Massie incident would be possible.

The Orange County Register publishes, "Editorial: No on Prop. 34."  Here's the beginning:

There's no question that the death penalty is a difficult issue. It involves the taking of a human life. In California, it also is applied only against someone convicted of first-degree murder combined with "special circumstances," such as multiple murder, murder during torture, rape, robbery or the killing of a witness. A killer in a bar fight typically is not executed.

On the Nov. 6 ballot, Proposition 34 aptly is described as the End the Death Penalty Initiative. If voters agree, California no longer would have a death penalty. The highest penalty would become "life in prison without the possibility of parole." The 700-plus inmates on death row would have their sentences reduced to prison without parole.

Earlier coverage of Prop. 34, the SAFE California ballot initiative, begins at the link; also available, more on Prop. 34 at SAFE Caliornia.

New California Polling

KQED-TV reports, "Poll: Californians Disenchanted With Death Penalty, 3 Strikes," by by Peter Jon Shuler.

A new poll out shows Californians disenchanted with the state's criminal justice system.  The Public Policy Institute of California surveyed likely voters on a wide range of topics on the November Ballot.  

The survey did not ask specific questions about Proposition 34, which would repeal the death penalty, or Proposition 36, which would revise the three-strikes law.  But questions about the concepts behind them turned up what appear to be shifting attitudes.

Across parties, demographics and regions, 73 percent said they favor changes to three strikes. PPIC president Mark Baldassare says Californians have become very conscious about the costs of prisons.
 
"Voters have identified for several years now that the state budget situation is a big problem, and they'd rather see money go to education than to corrections," Baldassare said.

Half of likely voters polled said the penalty for first degree-murder should be life imprisonment, while 42 percent said the penalty should be death.

"More Californians prefer life term to death penalty," is the Central Valley Business Times report.

Half of Californians who say they are likely voters in next month’s elections (50 percent) say life imprisonment with absolutely no possibility of parole should be the penalty for first-degree murder, while 42 percent say it should be death.

The figures are from the newest statewide polling by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, released Wednesday night.

Results were similar in September 2011 (50 percent life imprisonment, 45 percent death penalty).

Among likely voters, most Democrats (66 percent) prefer life imprisonment and most Republicans (58 percent) prefer the death penalty, while independents are split (42 percent life imprisonment, 43 percent death penalty).

The survey results may foreshadow the outcome of Proposition 34 on the ballot, which would eliminate the death penalty in the state.

Proposition 36, also on the ballot next month, would revise the three strikes law. Again, like the death penalty, the survey did not ask specifically about the propositions but did ask about some of the concepts behind them.

And:

The PPIC Statewide Survey was conducted with funding from The James Irvine Foundation. Findings are based on a telephone survey of 2,003 California adult residents interviewed on landlines and cell phones from Sept. 9-16.

Interviews were conducted in English or Spanish according to respondents' preferences.

The sampling error, taking design effects from weighting into consideration, is ±3.5 percent for all adults, ±3.9 percent for the 1,339 registered voters, and ±4.4 percent for the 995 likely voters.

Earlier coverage from California begins at the link.  Related posts are in the public opinion polling category index.  More on Prop. 34 at SAFE Caliornia.

New Texas Death Penalty Public Opinion Polling

The Texas Tribune posts, "UT/TT Poll: Texans Stand Behind Death Penalty."  It's by Ross Ramsey.  Graphs and full crosstabs are available at the link.

Texans remain strongly in favor of the death penalty and nominally in favor of abortion rights and medically assisted suicide, according to the University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll.

Voters' overwhelming support for the death penalty remains intact, with 73 percent either somewhat or strongly in support and only 21 percent opposed.

"We have had dramatic support for the death penalty for a long time," said poll co-director Jim Henson, who teaches government at the University of Texas at Austin and runs the Texas Politics Project. "And given an alternative, there's not a wholesale rush for the exits."

Voters remain in support of the death penalty — though less so — when offered the alternative of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Under those circumstances, 53 percent stick with the death penalty and 37 percent prefer life in prison.

Related posts are in the public opinion polling category index.

E.J. Dionne on the Connecticut Repeal

"Little Connecticut’s big message on the death penalty," is the title of E.J. Dionne's syndicated column, via the Washington Post.  He's a member of the Washington Post Writers Group.  Here's an extended excerpt from this must-read column:

Since the 2010 elections, newly empowered conservative and Republican state legislatures have gained national attention with their wars on public employee unions, additional restrictions on abortion and new barriers to voting.

Against this backdrop, the little state of Connecticut has loomed as a large progressive exception. Last year, it became the first state to require employers to grant paid sick leave. It also enacted a law granting in-state tuition to students whose parents brought them to the United States illegally as young children.

And last week, Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy signed a law repealing the state’s death penalty. There are now 17 states without capital punishment, Illinois having joined the ranks last year. What happened in Connecticut brings home the flaw in seeing everything that has happened in the states since the midterm vote as embodying a steady shift rightward.

Where they hold power, progressives have also been using their states as laboratories, and Malloy is part of an impressive group of mostly smaller-state Democratic governors who have combined a moderate, business-friendly style with progressive policymaking. Their ranks include, among others, Govs. Jack Markell in Delaware, Martin O’Malley in Maryland, John Hickenlooper in Colorado, Deval Patrick in Massachusetts and outgoing Gov. John Lynch in New Hampshire.

After the 2012 election, a key front in the battle for America’s political future will involve how the various left and right experiments in the states are judged. Aggressive conservatives such as Govs. Scott Walker in Wisconsin and John Kasich in Ohio are in the headlines now, and the recall Walker faces will keep him there for a while. But there will be a quieter and more comprehensive reckoning down the road.

Part of this reckoning will be a remarkable pivot in the politics of the death penalty, the premier issue on which an overwhelming consensus favoring what’s taken to be the conservative side has begun to crumble.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, capital punishment was a staple of Republican campaigns against a handful of liberals who bravely stuck with their opposition to the ultimate punishment. George H.W. Bush used the issue effectively against Democrat Mike Dukakis in the 1988 presidential campaign. Republicans also used it in their 1994 electoral sweep, notably in defeating three-term Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo in New York. And no wonder: In 1994, support for the death penalty hit its peak of 80 percent nationwide.

But a Gallup survey last fall showed how much things have changed: Support for capital punishment was down to 61 percent. Among the many reasons for the drop are a decline in crime rates, which has increased public confidence in the criminal justice system, and a stream of reports casting doubt on the guilt of some who were executed. In addition, significant groups of libertarian Republicans and opponents of abortion have crossed to the repeal side. An important test of the new politics of capital punishment will come this November in a California death penalty referendum.

For all this, it still takes political courage to end capital punishment. A Quinnipiac University poll released last week as Malloy signed the death penalty repeal found 62 percent of Connecticut voters still favoring executions of those convicted of murder, with only 30 percent opposed. Just 29 percent of those queried approved of the legislature’s handling of the issue, while 51 percent disapproved.

But (and it’s a very important but) support for the death penalty, in Connecticut and elsewhere, is not as robust as it looks. When Quinnipiac posed a different question — “Which punishment do you prefer for people convicted of murder, the death penalty, or life in prison with no chance of parole?” — only 46 percent favored the death penalty. An equal number chose life without parole. Death penalty opponents have an opening they haven’t had for some time.

Earlier coverage of the Connecticut repeal begins with the New York Times editorial noted in the preceding post.

California Roundup

Today's San Francisco Chronicle reports, "Death penalty foes launch initiative drive.  It's by Kevin Fagan.

Capital punishment opponents launched a drive Tuesday to place an initiative on the November 2012 ballot to replace the death penalty in California with a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole.

Organizers must collect 504,000 valid voter signatures by the March 18 deadline to qualify the initiative for the election. They've dubbed their measure the Savings, Accountability and Full Enforcement for California Act.

"Californians are ready for the SAFE California Act because now they realize we have wasted literally billions of dollars on a failed death penalty system," said Natasha Minsker, statewide campaign manager for the effort. "It's time to take our resources and put them instead toward public safety."

Minsker, an attorney in the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California who has long specialized in opposing executions, said the campaign has 800 volunteers and expects to have 2,000 by March. She estimated the campaign to qualify for the ballot will cost as much as $1.5 million, "and we have some great donors."

"Former inmate heads movement to abolish death penalty," is the KGO-TV report.

A San Francisco man who was freed by a judge after spending 21 years in jail is spearheading a campaign to abolish the death penalty in California.

Maurice Caldwell spoke in favor of the Safe California Act, a ballot proposal that would end capital punishment in the state and replace it with life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Caldwell says he's proof the criminal justice system makes mistakes.

Proponents began gathering signatures Tuesday and plan to put the initiative on the November 2012 ballot.

"Efforts Underway for Ballot Measure to End Death Penalty," at KPBS by Jenny O'Mara of the California Capitol Network.

Signature-gathering efforts are getting underway in California for a ballot measure that would end the death penalty. Supporters of the “Savings, Accountability and Full Enforcement for California Act” want to place the measure on the November, 2012 ballot. Campaign Manager Natasha Minsker said the initiative would replace death sentences with life in prison without parole.

“Murder victim family members are part of this campaign and that includes murder victim family members, where the perpetrator, the killer of their loved one is on death row in California and what they say first hand is that California’s death penalty is a cruel and empty promise to victims’ families,” said Minsker.

There is also commentary on the California campaign.  Today's Long Beach Press-Telegram carries the editorial, "The high cost of death penalty."

The long-standing debate about California's death penalty may soon become more than an abstract philosophical argument. At least 12 inmates on death row in San Quentin have exhausted their legal appeals and could face imminent execution once the courts resolve a challenge on the use of lethal injections.

Prison officials have notified a federal judge that they will have a new execution team in place shortly, which could mean the case will get a hearing early next year.

Death penalty opponents also are working to get an initiative on the November 2012 ballot that seeks to end executions. How a resumption of executions on a regular basis would affect California voters' views remains to be seen.

However, it is unlikely that executing a prisoner a month, as Ohio is doing now, would significantly affect the feasibility of the death penalty.

It still would be a policy that fails to accomplish its purpose of lowering murder rates and would continue to cost far more than an effective alternative.

Since the state's death penalty was reinstated in 1978, taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment. California has more than 700 inmates on death row, more than any other state. However, only 13 executions have been carried out, the last one in 2006. That amounts to $308 million per execution.

"State's death penalty ‘failed system'," is Susan Meeker's column for Tri-County Newspapers.

A ballot initiative could make its way to the voters in 2012 aims to replace the death penalty with life in prison without parole.

Backers of an initiative were given approval to begin gathering signatures by Secretary of State Debra Bowen on Friday.

Erin Mellon, a spokeswoman for Taxpayers for Justice, the organization behind the initiative, said a number of recent polls mean only one thing: California could be on the verge of dumping the death penalty.

"Californians are ready for change," Mellon said Tuesday. "People have wisened up to the fact that the death penalty is too expensive. It is a failed system."

The initiative is partly based on a study released in June by U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Arthur L. Alarcon that found California's death penalty system is costing the state about $184 million per year.

A field poll, released Sept. 29, shows 48 percent of California voters have a strong preference for life without the possibility of parole over the death penalty — a substantial increase from 20 years ago.

Cost is the key reason for the shift, Mellon said.

Catholic San Francisco carries the column, "‘The better angels of our nature’," by John Garvey.

Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard, recently published a book entitled “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” which argues that the age that we live in is less violent than any other period in history.

Archeological studies of pre-state societies suggest that as many as 15 percent of the population met violent deaths. Murder rates in Europe today are 10 to 50 times lower than they were in the Middle Ages.

Pinker attributes this “civilizing process” to a number of causes – the increasing power of the state, the growth of commerce, improvements in the status of women and even progress in our moral reasoning.

Whether we actually do get better at moral reasoning is a very complicated question. It may be that we reach different conclusions when we apply the same principles in different social situations.

Take the issue of capital punishment.

Today's Los Angeles Times carries the OpEd, "The death penalty: valid yet targeted," by David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew Grossman, lawyers in Washington, D.C.

Unable to convince the public on the merits of abolition, death-penalty opponents have a new strategy, attacking capital punishment on fiscal grounds. That is the basis for a ballot initiative to stop executions in California that backers of a capital punishment ban hope to qualify for the November 2012 ballot. They do have half a point: Litigation has driven up the cost of executions, and delays and expense mean that states don't always seek death for the worst of the worst.

But this argument is beyond hypocritical, coming from the same groups that have thrown up every possible roadblock to timely and efficient administration of capital punishment.

If these groups took their fiscal rhetoric seriously, they would do better to acknowledge the Constitution's text and history and drop their endless campaigns to litigate the death penalty out of existence, which cost taxpayers millions to defend. The public should not be denied the choice that the Constitution allows: an affordable and effective ultimate punishment.

NBC LA posts, "Anti-Death Penalty Budgeting Bungle," by Joe Mathews.

Specifically, the initiative takes money out of the general fund -- which is to say, out of the famously distressed and unbalanced state budget -- and puts it into a special fund called the "SAFE California Fund."

Over four years, from 2012 to 2016, a total of $100 million would be taken from the budget for this fund. These funds, according to the text of the initiative,

"shall be used exclusively for the purposes of this Act and shall not be subject to appropriation or transfer by the Legislature for any other purpose."

What are the purposes? To speed the solving of cases of rape and murder.

Who could argue with such a good cause? No one -- which is why it's smart politics to have this sort of thing in the act.

But it's terrible policy.

The act gives the attorney general -- not the legislature or governor -- control over the money, essentially giving a state official the ability to influence how local police departments allocate resources.

Earlier coverage of the California SAFE initiative begins at the link.

The Latest Public Opinion Polling From Gallup & CNN|ORC

"In U.S., Support for Death Penalty Falls to 39-Year Low," is the title of the report by Frank Newport of the Gallup Organization.  Charts and graphs are at the link.

Sixty-one percent of Americans approve of using the death penalty for persons convicted of murder, down from 64% last year. This is the lowest level of support since 1972, the year the Supreme Court voided all existing state death penalty laws in Furman v. Georgia.

And:

Support for the death penalty in cases of murder has varied substantially over the past 75 years. A majority of Americans supported the death penalty when Gallup first asked about it in 1936, and less than a majority supported it in various Gallup polls between 1957 and 1971, but support has returned to a majority level since. Support peaked in the 1990s as concerns about crime rose, but since that point it has declined, although a clear majority of Americans still favor its use in cases of murder.

Recent years have seen renewed controversy over the death penalty's use, including the 2010 execution of Teresa Lewis in Virginia, the first woman to be executed in that state in almost 100 years, and the execution of Davis in September of this year. It is not clear whether the death penalty will be an issue in next year's presidential race, although Texas Gov. Rick Perry was asked in a recent Republican debate about his state's status as the most frequent in carrying out the death penalty.

Historic trends from Gallup polling on capital punishment is available in an Adobe .pdf document.

News coverage of the polling includes:

"Gallup Poll: 35% oppose death penalty," by Gary Strauss at USA Today.

More than one-third of Americans now oppose the death penalty — the highest level in nearly 40 years — according to a Gallup Poll out Thursday.

Moreover, those who believe the death penalty is being applied fairly, and those who say it isn't used often enough, are at the lowest levels in a decade, underscoring significant changes in attitudes.

Gallup found that 35% of those polled oppose the death penalty — the highest opposition since March 1972. That year, the Supreme Court effectively ruled that the death penalty was constitutional unless it was applied unfairly. By 1976, several states had reinstituted capital punishment.

Just 40% of those polled last week believe the death penalty isn't imposed often enough, the lowest level since May 2001.

The poll was conducted shortly after two controversial cases drew attention: the September execution of Troy Davis and last week's Supreme Court hearing involving Alabama death row inmate Cory Maples.

CNN posts, "Number who prefer death penalty on decline."

When offered a choice between sentencing a murderer to capital punishment or life in prison with no chance of parole, half of all Americans say they prefer a life sentence over the death penalty - the first time that has happened in CNN polling.

Fifty percent would opt for a life sentence; 48% said they would choose the death penalty, revealing a nation divided when it comes to capital punishment.

Full results (pdf)

The remaining two percent had no opinion in the survey released Wednesday.

"That's not to say that Americans want to abolish the death penalty entirely," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "But there is a difference between thinking that the government should have the death penalty as an option and actually wanting to see it applied."

Seven years ago, 56% of the nation said they preferred the death penalty, a number that decreased to 53% in 2009 and to 48% now. At the same time the number of Americans who believe that at least one person in the past five years has been executed for a crime that he or she did not commit increased to 72%.

The issue of the death penalty has even found its way onto the 2012 campaign trail, with some media attention given to the controversy surrounding the execution of death row inmate Todd Willingham. Willingham, who maintained his innocence, received the death penalty while GOP contender Rick Perry served as governor of Texas.

In 2005, when a solid majority preferred the death penalty, 59% believed that an innocent person had been executed within the previous five years. The CNN/ORC International survey reveals that figure has risen thirteen points.

"Support for death penalty declines," at UPI.

Support for the death penalty is most often expressed by white, male Republicans more than 30 years of age who live in southern and Midwestern states, Gallup said.

The Gallup poll results are based on telephone interviews with 1,005 adults. The margin of sampling error is 4 percentage points.

"Poll: Death penalty support lowest ever," by MJ Lee at Politico.

The survey also indicates that Americans feel less confident that the death penalty is applied fairly than they have in recent years, with 52 percent saying they think the punishment is used fairly, down from 58 percent last year.

Republicans and independents who lean Republican are far more likely to approve of the death penalty — 73 percent of them said they approve, compared with 46 percent of Democrats and independents who lean Democrat. More men also expressed stronger support for capital punishment, with 64 percent of men saying they approve of the method while 57 of females said the same.

Support for the death penalty was highest in the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, with an all-time high of 80 percent expressing support for it in 1994.

Related posts are in the public opinon polling index.

California's Death Row

The Atlantic's November issue carries, "The Appeal of Death Row," written by Mary A. Fischer.

Experts on both sides of the death-penalty debate have long agreed that California’s system is the nation’s costliest and least efficient. This June, a landmark report by Paula M. Mitchell, a professor at Loyola Law School, and Arthur L. Alarcón, a senior judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, unearthed new data that reveal just how bad the system is.

Their report showed that since the current death-penalty statute was enacted in 1978, taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on only 13 executions, or roughly $308 million per execution. As of 2009, prosecuting death-penalty cases cost upwards of $184 million more each year than life-without-parole cases. Housing, health care, and legal representation for California’s current death-row population of 714—the largest in the country—account for $144 million in annual extra costs. If juries continue to send an average of 20 convicts to San Quentin’s death row each year, and executions continue at the present rate, by 2030 the ranks of the condemned will have swelled to more than 1,000, and California’s taxpayers will have spent $9 billion to execute a total of 23 inmates.

“I was stunned by the report,” said Loni Hancock, a Democratic state senator from Oakland and a member of the senate budget committee. Hancock had spent the previous five months agonizing over deep cuts to California’s general budget, and “it broke my heart,” she said. “That’s when I decided the time had come for Californians to reconsider the death penalty.”

And:

For the time being, Governor Brown has no comment on this issue, says a spokesman. As governor in 1977, he vetoed a pro-death-penalty bill, and last April, he stopped a $356 million expansion of San Quentin’s death row, calling the cost “unconscionable” in a time of deep budget cuts to education and social services.

"Repeal of death penalty could save millions of dollars, analysis finds," is the title of Will Evans' post at California Watch.

A nonpartisan analysis of a California ballot initiative to abolish the death penalty found that it could save the state and counties in the "high tens of millions of dollars" every year.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office review of the proposed initiative, which hasn't been cleared for signature gathering yet, put it in the middle of a debate over what the death penalty costs and what should be done about it. Some critics of the death penalty think it actually costs much more than the analysis said, while supporters of capital punishment think executions should be streamlined, not stopped, in order to cut costs.

The initiative was proposed in August after a bill to repeal the death penalty stalled in the state Legislature. In addition to eliminating capital punishment, the measure would require those convicted of murder to work in prison and provide $100 million over four years to local law enforcement to help solve homicide and rape cases. The proposal likely faces a rough road ahead, as a recent Field Poll [PDF] found a strong majority of Californians want to keep capital punishment, even as an increasing number prefer life in prison without parole.

And:

Loyola Law School professor Paula Mitchell, co-author of a recent study on the cost of California's death penalty, said the analyst's office report "severely underestimated" costs to taxpayers. Her study [PDF], written with U.S. 9th Circuit Court Judge Arthur Alarcón, found that California has spent $4 billion on the death penalty since 1978 and $184 million in 2009 alone. It was critical of past estimates by the Legislative Analyst's Office.

Mitchell said it was disappointing that the latest report did not include the hundreds of millions of dollars it would take to build a new complex for death row inmates, "which will be required if California keeps the death penalty."

"If the initiative process in California is going to function as an effective part of the democratic process, voters MUST be fully informed about the full costs of the programs they are asked to vote for or against," Mitchell wrote in an e-mail.

Earlier coverage from California begins with reporting on the Field Poll.

New Field Poll From California

The Complete Field Poll, "Tabulations From a Survey of California Registered Voters about the Death Penalty and Life in Prison Without the Possibility of Parole," is available in Adobe .pdf format.

"Field Poll: Less voter support for death penalty," is the San Francisco Chronicle's report written by Marisa Lagos.

As they have for more than five decades, California voters overwhelmingly support the death penalty - but in a marked shift, more voters now prefer that convicted murderers be sentenced to life without parole instead of death, according to the latest Field Poll.

The survey, conducted this month, comes as criminal-justice-reform advocates are gathering signatures for a 2012 ballot measure that would ban capital punishment in California.

The poll shows they have their work cut out for them: A solid 68 percent of voters favor keeping the death penalty, with conservatives overwhelmingly in support and nearly half of liberals opposed. But for the first time since the poll began asking the question 11 years ago, more voters - 48 percent - say they would prefer that someone convicted of first-degree murder serve life without the possibility of parole. Forty percent prefer the death penalty.

Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo noted that 11 years ago, 44 percent of those polled said they preferred death as punishment for first-degree murder and only 37 percent in favored life in prison. Last year, it was nearly evenly split.

But this year, the debate has gathered steam in California and elsewhere. The recent execution of a Georgia man many believe was innocent reignited the debate nationally, and executions have been on hold in California since 2006 because of a lawsuit challenging the state's lethal injection method.

Forty-three percent of voters surveyed by the Field Poll said they think the death penalty is cheaper than life imprisonment, while 41 percent think it is more expensive.

"FIELD POLL: Voters divided over death penalty," by Ben Goad in the Riverside Press-Enterprise.

Most California voters support the death penalty, but a growing number prefer sentencing convicted killers to life in prison without the possibility of parole, a new survey found.

 

Sixty-eight percent of the state's voters want to keep the death penalty in place, while 27 percent would like to get rid of it and 5 percent are without an opinion, according to today's Field Poll.

 

Forty-eight percent of voters would rather see a sentence of life without parole for someone found guilty of first-degree murder, while 40 percent would prefer to put them to death.

And:

The plurality of voters who favor life sentences over the death penalty represents a reversal from past polls. A similar poll conducted last year found voters split almost evenly on the issue. In 2000, 37 percent favored life in prison, while 44 percent preferred executing first-degree murderers.

"It's flipped in the last 11 years," said DiCamillo, who cited several factors that likely contributed to the reversal.

First is an increase of people who believe innocent people are executed too often and that there's no way to correct such mistakes. In 1989, just 23 percent of California's voters felt that way, but 39 percent now do, according to today's survey.

Over the same period, there has also been an increase, from 27 to 45 percent, in the number of voters who believe people sentenced to life without parole really will never get out of prison, the poll found.

"Californians remain staunchly in favor of death penalty, poll finds," by Sam Stanton in the Sacramento Bee.

As death penalty opponents work to get a ballot measure before California voters next fall to abolish capital punishment, a new Field Poll indicates the initiative would be a tough sell.

More than two-thirds of state voters – 68 percent – favor keeping the death penalty, the poll found, with 27 percent favoring abolition and 5 percent expressing no opinion.

"We've polled on this for 55 years," Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo said. "It's changed a little here and there, but just removing the death penalty as a potential punishment is opposed. That's pretty clear."

Death penalty opponents launched an effort in August to replace capital punishment with a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole, something they said would save the state millions of dollars each year.

On that point, the poll released today found that more voters – 48 percent – now support imposing a life-without-parole sentence for first-degree murderers than those who favor the death penalty – 40 percent – in such cases.

"I think what the public had in mind is the use of the death penalty for very heinous crimes, like multiple cop killings or terrorists," DiCamillo said.

California Taxpayers for Justice has issued a news release, "Historic Turn Away from the Death Penalty in California; Strong Preference for Life Without Parole Among Voters."  Here's the complete release:

For the first time, a statewide poll conducted by Field Poll confirmed that more voters in California prefer a sentence of life without the possibility of parole over the death penalty.

“This is heartening news for SAFE California. We see this as a historic shift that will carry us through to the elections,” said Jeanne Woodford, former San Quentin warden and spokesperson for the campaign to put an initiative on the ballot to replace the death penalty with life without parole at the November 2012 election.

The Field Poll results document a 15-point shift over the last decade in support for life without parole over the death penalty. In 2000, polling numbers were at 37% to 44%, with the death penalty edging out life without parole. Last year, the same polling firm reported results of 42% to 41%, with a one-point preference for life without parole over the death penalty.

“What we have today is an 8-point preference for life without parole. This is very significant in terms of a shift in public opinion in support of replacing the death penalty that bodes very well for the ballot initiative,” said David Binder of David Binder Research. “It’s important to note that when voters hear the specifics of the measure—that convicted murderers will be required to work and pay restitution into a victims’ compensation fund and how much money will be saved—a strong majority of voters support the initiative.”

The SAFE California campaign also sets aside $100 million in budget savings in the “SAFE California Fund” to investigate open rape and murder cases.

“Once voters understand that the death penalty is far more expensive than life without parole we are sure that support will grow even stronger,” added Woodford. “While we pour money into a broken system, 46% of murders and 56% of reported rapes go unsolved every year in California. The poll results show California voters are ready to dump this dangerous system for one that actually provides savings and real public safety.”

Support for life without parole was particularly strong among Latino and African-American voters, at 55% and 66% support for permanent imprisonment over the death penalty respectively.

The SAFE California Campaign is supported by a coalition of law enforcement, murder victim family members and exonerees, along with a broad range of organizations, that will soon begin gathering signatures to place an initiative on the ballot to replace California’s costly death penalty with life in prison without possibility of parole.

Related posts are in the public opinion polling index.  Earlier coverage of the California ballot initiative begins at the link.

New Public Opinion Polling

CBS News reports, "Support for the death penalty for convicted murderers at a 20-year low."  It's written by Fred Backus.  A detailed statistical breakdown of the polling results is at the link.

Here's an excerpt from the narrative:

A majority of Americans continue to support the death penalty for persons of convicted of murder, but that support is at the lowest it has been for the past twenty years, according to the latest CBS News/New York Times Poll.

Currently, 60 percent of Americans favor the death penalty for convicted murderers, while 27 percent are opposed. This percentage is down slightly from when it was last asked in May of last year, and down 18 percentage points from when the question was first asked by CBS in October 1988, at the height of a presidential campaign in which Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis was being buffeted by charges of being soft on crime during his tenure as governor of Massachusetts.

This poll was conducted from September 10th through September 15th - a few days before the execution of Troy Davis on September 21st in Georgia for the 1989 murder of police officer Mark MacPhail.

When comparing views on the death penalty between now and approximately twenty years ago, while Republicans continue to show strong support for the death penalty, a marked decline can be seen among both Democrats and independents.

Gallup polls indicate similar results over the past twenty years, and a fluctuation in approval over the past seven decades. According to Gallup, a slight majority of Americans supported the death penalty in 1936 and up through the 1950s, with public opinion dividing on the issue in the mid 1960s. In 1972 - when the U.S. Supreme Court briefly ended capital punishment in the United States for four years - a majority was once again in favor of the death penalty. By the time capital punishment was resumed in 1976, two-thirds of Americans were in favor of the death penalty for persons convicted of murder, with support reaching its high point in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Related posts are in the public opinion polling index.

Much More on the Troy Davis Execuion

In this post I'll be linking to news analysis of the execution.  The next posts will focus on commentary and editorials.

Today's New York Times reports, "In Death-Penalty Debate, Execution Offers Little Closure."   It's by John Schwartz.

The nature of those doubts and the arguments for Mr. Davis’s innocence could be, and will be, debated endlessly. And while no judge who reviewed the minimal physical evidence and the testimony and witness recantations ever overturned Mr. Davis’s conviction — one judge dismissed the defense arguments as “smoke and mirrors” — activists portrayed the case as a symbol of the fallibility of eyewitness identification, of the intransigence of the justice system and of its unwillingness to correct errors — and even as a failure of the nation itself.

“The execution of an innocent man crystallizes in the most sickening way the vast systemic injustices that plague our death penalty system,” Denny LeBoeuf, director of the Capital Punishment Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.

Amnesty International, which mobilized much of the opposition to the Davis execution, pledged to redouble its efforts against the death penalty in the United States, and the executive committee of the N.A.A.C.P. voted this week to raise the death penalty to the forefront of its list of priorities in future advocacy.

Stephen Dear, executive director of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, an interfaith advocacy group based in Carrboro, N.C., said his group also planned to use the momentum generated by religious leaders who opposed the Davis execution to galvanize broader opposition. “This has been a teachable moment for America’s religious leadership: that the death penalty is so awash with bias and errors that there’s no morally acceptable alternative but repealing it,” Mr. Dear said.

But can the debate over the death penalty even be called a national conversation, or is it simply two factions shouting past each other? Does it change hearts and minds, or harden advocates in their positions? Brawls, after all, do not persuade.

This execution underscores the uncomfortable relationship Americans have with the death penalty. A Gallup poll last October showed that 64 percent of those surveyed supported it for those convicted of murder, a level that had been relatively consistent for the previous seven years. Support had been higher — 80 percent in 1994 — but it has slipped, in part because of the hundreds of convictions overturned because of DNA evidence.

Gallup has asked whether people favor life imprisonment without parole as an alternative to the death penalty, and those surveyed are almost evenly split, with 49 percent supporting capital punishment and 46 percent preferring life imprisonment.

AP's Greg Bluestein files, "Death penalty opponents regroup after Davis' death."  It's via the San Francisco Chronicle.

Capital punishment critics are regrouping after the execution of Georgia inmate Troy Davis, trying to figure out the best way to harness the anti-death penalty sentiment the case created. Among the goals: get new like-minded people registered to vote.

"Tell them to get engaged in the political process because that's where change is going to come," said Helen Butler, executive director of the Atlanta-based Coalition For The Peoples' Agenda.

Butler was among a group of about two dozen death penalty opponents who met Thursday night in Atlanta to discuss how they could abolish capital punishment in Georgia. They are a small piece of the hundreds of thousands of people the Davis case attracted, from well-known supporters like the pope and former president Jimmy Carter to those much-less politically active.

Laura Moye of Amnesty International said she expects the Davis execution to be used to rally repeal movements across the country. She plans to meet with activists in Georgia over the next few days to plot out an attempt to banish capital punishment there.

"I'm meeting people who didn't really ever speak about the death penalty and now they are. They're hungry about the information and now they know," she said.

And:

Already, there are calls for lasting changes to the capital punishment system from Davis' advocates. Former President Carter said he hopes "this tragedy will spur us as a nation toward the total rejection of capital punishment." Filmmaker Michael Moore posted a statement on his website calling for a boycott of Georgia.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who visited Davis on death row, said he will push for a national ban on capital punishment in cases that rely on eyewitness testimony. Maryland passed such a law in 2009.

"We must not only mourn what happened to Troy Davis but take strong measures so that it does not happen again," Sharpton said.

The Davis execution comes at a time when death penalty decisions are under increased scrutiny. The number of executions has dropped by half over the last decade, from 98 in 1999 to 46 in 2010. Illinois abolished capital punishment in March and several other states, including California and Connecticut, are expected to consider similar proposals next year.

Today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution carries, "Troy Davis lost his life, will he win the PR battle," by Steve Visser.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock told the college students in a church outside the state prison near Jackson Wednesday night that they had joined the fight for racial justice in America with the stand against the execution of Troy Anthony Davis.

The battle was bigger, he said, than saving Davis' life. He said he talked to the condemned man this week and he asked him what he should tell the people.

"He said, "Tell them I am already victorious,"  said Warnock, the senior pastor at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Stan Gunter had to agree. The executive director of the Georgia Prosecuting Attorneys Council said that Davis and the mega public-relations machine behind him had managed to distort the facts of the murder case down to sound bite of  "seven  witnesses recanted or they backed off their testimony" which had allowed the well-funded NAACP and Amnesty International to portray Davis as an innocent man.

Court after court has upheld the legitimacy of the Davis conviction for the murder of Savannah Police Officer Mark Allen MacPhail and dismissed his claims of new evidence exonerating him. But despite the fact that the execution appears solidly grounded in law, by Wednesday night Davis' supporters appeared to have grown to include even supporters of the death penalty who doubted its fairness in this case in part because of the forces aligned against it.

"Troy Davis execution: Did the death penalty deliver justice?," by Patrik Jonsson at the Christian Science Monitor.

For thousands around the world, Mr. Davis's death marked a grave injustice, given vexing questions and new doubts about his guilt.

But while many saw the execution as symbolic of a fallible justice system, and an immoral punishment, others found their faith in the system reaffirmed by an abundance of court and executive reviews that, time after time, let the verdict against Davis stand.

The Davis case is but one in a long series of death penalty cases that push individual states to debate the morality, legality, and efficacy of the death penalty.

And:

One problem, legal analysts say, is courts are vested in jury verdicts, which can be fallible. Doubts alone are rarely enough to overturn a finding of guilt, but in cases like Davis's, where there is impassioned belief of innocence, it "raises doubts about whether the legal system can tolerate this potential error in allowing a person to be executed," says James Acker, a criminologist at State University New York in Albany.

But the Davis case also had powerful emotional impact that made him a cause célèbre among human rights activists working to end the US death penalty. A black man being executed for the murder of a white man in the Deep South raised longstanding and deep-seated concerns about racial inequities in the justice system.

Davis's execution stood in sharp contrast to the execution the same day in Texas of Mr. Brewer, a white man convicted and sentenced to death for a heinous hate crime against a black man.

"Can we have the death penalty and actually avoid the possibility of killing innocent people?" writes Rashad Robinson, executive director of the activist group Color of Change. "In a criminal justice system that routinely misidentifies black suspects and disproportionately punishes black people, black folks are more likely to be wrongfully executed."

Earlier coverage of Troy Davis' case and execution begins at the link.

News From DPIC

 Celeste Rosenlof posts, "Studies about death penalty show mixed opinion," at Utah's Deseret News.

According to a new fact sheet released by the Death Penalty Information Center, police chiefs ranked the death penalty last in ways to reduce violent crime.

A Gallup poll showed that the public agrees, as 64 percent of the public felt that the death penalty does not act as a deterrent or lower the murder rate, while 34 percent believe it does. The majority of criminology experts, 88 percent, "rejected the notion that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder," according to the DPIC fact sheet.

And:

The fact sheet said "a clear majority of (public) voters (61 percent) would choose a punishment other than the death penalty for murder."

Gallup found that in October 2010, 49 percent would chose the death penalty, and 46 percent prefer life imprisonment.

The fact sheet also pointed out that execution consistently costs states more than a life sentence, sometimes up to 70 percent more. The Gallup poll found that 11 percent of people said they favor the death penalty to "save taxpayers money (or the) cost associated with prison," and 37 percent favored it because "they took a life (it) fits the crime."

More at the Death Penalty Information Center website; related posts, in the public opinion polling index.

Death Penalty Information Center Issues 2010 Report

DPIC has issued The Death Penalty in 2010: A Year End Report, in Adobe .pdf format, today.

The news release announcing the report is titled, "DPIC's Year End Report: Executions Down 12% Nationwide, 29% in Texas; Death Sentences Near Historic Lows.  2010 Election Results Confirm Poll Finding Majority Favor Alternative Punishments and Will Support Politicians Who Vote for Repeal of the Death Penalty."

The country experienced a 12 percent decrease in executions in 2010 compared to 2009 and a more than 50 percent drop compared to 1999, according to a report released today by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). Texas had 29 percent fewer executions in 2010 than the previous year.

DPIC projects that the number of new death sentences will be 114 for 2010, remaining near last year's number of 112, which was the lowest number since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Death sentences declined in all four regions of the country over the past ten years, with a 50 percent decrease nationwide when the current decade is compared to the 1990s.

"Whether it's concerns about the high costs of the death penalty at a time when budgets are being slashed, the risks of executing the innocent, unfairness, or other reasons, the nation continued to move away from the death penalty in 2010," said Richard Dieter, DPIC's Executive Director and the report's author.

Although the recent elections brought a dramatic shift in political alliances, candidates who questioned the death penalty were elected across the country, including governors in California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Kansas, and Illinois.

For example, Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris were elected as governor and attorney general of California, despite heavy TV ads attacking them as death penalty opponents. Daniel Malloy, who opposes the death penalty, was elected governor of Connecticut in the midst of a high-profile capital trial. As its new governor, Kansas elected conservative Sam Brownback, who has expressed moral reservations about capital punishment.

"This year's election results confirm polling data that suggests opposing the death penalty is an acceptable position for elected officials and candidates. Voters hold other issues, such as the economy and jobs, as much higher priorities," Dieter said.

In a poll conducted by Lake Research Partners this year, there was strong bi-partisan support for doing everything possible to prevent the execution of innocent people: at least 80 percent of Republicans, Democrats, Conservatives, Moderates and Liberals all supported that premise.

In the same poll, a clear majority (61 percent) of the public favored some form of life imprisonment and only 33 percent supported the death penalty as the punishment for murder. A plurality of voters in death penalty states said it would make no difference in their vote if a representative supported repeal of the death penalty. A majority (62 percent) said either it would make no difference (38 percent) or they would be more likely to vote for such a representative (24 percent).

In Texas, evidence emerged of critical errors in two cases where executions had already occurred (Cameron Willingham and Claude Jones). In addition, Anthony Graves was exonerated from Texas' death row and the prosecutor acknowledged, "We found not one piece of credible evidence that links Anthony Graves to the commission of this capital murder … He is an innocent man."

Only 12 states carried out executions in 2010, mostly in the South, and only seven states carried out more than one execution. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, 82 percent of the executions have been in the South. California has not had an execution in almost 5 years, and the same is true for North Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and many other states that rarely carry out the death penalty.

(The Mississippi Attorney General has requested an execution to be set for December 29, but the court has not responded to this request, and it appears unlikely to occur. This execution, if it were to occur, would change the total number of executions in 2010.)

Death Penalty Information Center is a non-profit organization serving the media and the public with analysis and information on issues concerning capital punishment. DPIC was founded in 1990 and prepares in-depth reports, issues press releases, conducts briefings for the media, and serves as a resource to those working on this issue. DPIC is widely quoted and consulted by all those concerned with the death penalty.

The next post will link to news coverage.  Last week, the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty issued a report on Texas' use of capital punishment in 2010.

More on the cases of Anthony Graves, Claude Jones, and Todd Willingham at the links.

News Coverage of DPIC Public Opinion Polling

"Death penalty for murder? Majority supports an alternative, poll says," is the title of the Christian Science Monitor report by Walter Richey.

Sixty-one percent of registered voters said they would favor a punishment for murder other than the death penalty, according to a survey made public on Tuesday.

The poll, conducted for the Death Penalty Information Center, an antideath-penalty organization, found that when offered nonlethal alternative forms of punishment, only 33 percent of respondents supported the death penalty for murder.

The survey results challenge the findings of other polls that suggest Americans support the death penalty by a wide margin. Pollsters said the results can depend on how the question is asked.

“We find that when voters have a choice, the majority chooses some alternative to the death penalty,” said Celinda Lake of the polling firm Lake Research Partners.

“This is a complex policy question,” Ms. Lake said in a telephone conference call with reporters. “If given a simple question without choices, they choose the death penalty. But when given real choices they will choose something other than the death penalty.”

The nationwide survey of 1,500 registered voters was conducted in May and carries a margin of error of 2.5 percent.

Respondents were asked which of four statements about punishment for murder was closest to their own view.

1) The penalty for murder should be the death penalty – 33 percent.

2) The penalty for murder should be life in prison WITH the possibility of parole – 9 percent.

3) The penalty for murder should be life in prison with NO possibility of parole – 13 percent.

4) The penalty for murder should be life in prison with NO possibility of parole, AND a requirement to work to make restitution for the victim’s family – 39 percent.

Six percent of those polled said they did not know or declined to answer.

AFP files, "Most Americans support alternative to death penalty: poll," via Google News.

"The conventional wisdom says that a large majority of Americans unequivocally support the death penalty, and we find that the conventional wisdom, as frequently the case, is not correct," Lake told a press conference.

"We find that when voters have a choice, the majority choose some alternative punishments for murder over the death penalty."

The United States is among just a handful of industrialized democracies that still carry out executions.

Thirty-five of the 50 US states currently allow for capital punishment, and 1,233 people have been executed since the death penalty was reintroduced in 1976, according to DPIC.

The issue remains a controversial one. Poll respondents cited unfairness, high cost and innocence of defendants in US death row cases as the primary considerations in their responses.

The DPIC survey showed that, according to the respondents, convicts are sentenced to death largely depending on "how much money they make, where they live, or the color of their skin."

Lake said two emerging groups of voters led the opposition to capital punishment. Some 72 percent of Hispanic voters were against it, largely on moral and religious grounds, while seven in 10 voters under age 30 were opposed.

"These results show that the American people are ready for a serious discussion on death penalty," DPIC director Richard Dieter said.

The poll, conducted last May, asked a series of 60 questions to 1,500 registered voters across the country, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percent.

"Poll: Two Thirds Of Americans Prefer Alternative To Death Penalty," is the title of Laura Bassett's report at Huffington Post.

There has been a 60 percent drop in executions in America since 2000, and, in tandem with this decline, the death penalty appears to be steadily losing popularity among voters who say they are more concerned with budget issues and the deficit than with executing the nation's murderers. According to a national poll of 1,500 registered voters conducted by Lake Research Partners, 61 percent of Americans surveyed said they would prefer alternative punishments for murder, such as life without parole, over the death penalty.

After being informed of the cost of carrying out executions and recent statistics on exoneration, 65 percent of voters polled said they would rather replace the death penalty with an alternative punishment and use the saved money for other crime-prevention measures instead. The unfairness with which the death penalty is sentenced, the high costs of executions, the amount of innocent people who are wrongly executed and the emotional impact of the death penalty on victims' families proved to be the most important factors influencing voters' thinking on the death penalty. Only a small percentage of those polled, mainly Catholic and Latino voters, reported a strong moral or religious opposition to capital punishment.

Today's Dayton Daily News carries, "Survey: 2 out of 3 Americans against the death penalty."  It's by Tom Beyerlein.

Ohio has executed eight men this year, the most in any one year since 1949, when 15 were put to death. Gov. Ted Strickland commuted three death sentences this year, including that of Sidney Cornwell on Monday.

Dieter said Ohio ranks second in executions in 2010 to Texas’ 17, with Alabama ranking third with five.

Earlier coverage, with links to the polling results, is at yesterday's post, "Death Penalty Information Center Polling. Related posts are in the public opinion polling index.

Death Penalty Information Center Polling

The Death Penalty Information Center has issued a news release, "Poll Shows Growing Support for Alternatives to the Death Penalty; Capital Punishment Ranked Lowest Among Budget Priorities; Unfairness, high costs, victims’ needs, and innocence are important to voters’ thinking about the death penalty," announcing the results of extensive public opinion polling.

Here's the text of the release:

The Death Penalty Information Center today released the results of one of the most comprehensive studies ever conducted of Americans’ views on the death penalty. A national poll of 1,500 registered voters conducted by Lake Research Partners shows growing support for alternatives to the death penalty compared with previous polls. A clear majority of voters (61%) would choose a punishment other than the death penalty for murder, including life with no possibility of parole and with restitution to the victim’s family (39%), life with no possibility of parole (13%), or life with the possibility of parole (9%).

In states with the death penalty, a plurality of voters said it would make no difference in their vote if a representative supported repeal of the death penalty; and a majority (62%) said either it would make no difference (38%) or they would be more likely to vote for such a representative (24%).

“For decades, politicians have equated being tough on crime with support for the death penalty, but this research suggests voters want their elected officials to be smart on crime, use tax dollars wisely, and fund the services they care about the most. Capital punishment is not a high priority for voters and is not the ‘third rail’ of politics,” said Richard Dieter, Executive Director of Death Penalty Information Center.
“We see a real openness to considering life with no possibility for parole as a punishment for murder and a real awareness among Americans of the many problems with the death penalty.  It is likely we will see Americans moving away from support for the death penalty as states and local governments grapple with tight budgets and as today’s younger voters and Latinos move into the core of the electorate,” said pollster Celinda Lake.

Since the start of 2009, many states, such as Maryland, Colorado, Connecticut, Montana, Kansas, and New Mexico considered legislation to repeal the death penalty, and it is expected that trend will continue in 2011.

Additional key findings from the polling research include:

• Costs emerged as an important concern for a strong majority of Americans. Sixty-eight percent said cost was a very or somewhat convincing argument against the death penalty. Voters ranked emergency services, creating jobs, police and crime prevention, schools and libraries, public health care services, and roads and transportation as more important budget priorities than the death penalty.     
• A strong majority of respondents (65%) would favor replacing the death penalty with life with no possibility of parole if the money saved were used to fund crime prevention programs.
• Hispanic voters were among those most willing to replace the death penalty with an alternative punishment. They responded most strongly to moral objections to the death penalty rooted in faith, as well as the argument that the death penalty is particularly unfair along racial lines.  

• The poll explored the information that the public uses to make up its mind about the death penalty and the problems they see with this punishment.  
• Some of the public’s top concerns about the death penalty were that it is applied unevenly and unfairly; it subjects victims’ families to lengthy trials and years of appeals that interfere with the healing process; and it risks executing the innocent.
• Spending millions of dollars on the death penalty, at a time when states are cutting back on services such as police forces, schools, and public health, and when life in prison would cost less, was also of concern to voters.  
• Moral and religious objections to the death penalty were strong among Latino and Catholic voters.

The nationwide poll of 1,500 registered voters was conducted by Lake Research Partners in May, 2010 with a margin of error of +/- 2.5%.  

Related posts are in the public opinion polling index.

Angus Reid Public Opinion Polling

First, a disclaimer.  This polling is at considerable odds with the most recent Gallup Poll, released earlier this week, by a degree well beyond the margin of error.  Indeed, even the Scripps-Howard Texas Poll was not showing this level of support for capital punishment in Texas during its final polls in 2000-2004.  I'm highly skeptical of the results given the results available in extensive polling from other sources.

"Americans Support Punishing Murder with the Death Penalty," is the Angus Reid release.

Four-in-five respondents believe innocent people have been executed in the United States.

Most Americans support the death penalty in murder cases, but are divided on whether it acts as a deterrent for potential criminals, a new Angus Reid Public Opinion poll has found.

The online survey of a representative sample of 1,006 American adults also finds that a high proportion of respondents believe that innocent people have been executed in the United States.

Across the country, 83 per cent of respondents support punishing homicide with the death penalty, while 13 per cent are opposed. A majority of Americans would also rely on capital punishment to punish rape (62%) and kidnapping (51%), but not armed robbery (40%).

Respondents are evenly split on the overall effect of the death penalty. While 39 per cent of Americans think capital punishment acts as a deterrent, 35 per cent disagree. Republicans (52%) are more likely to believe that the death penalty deters potential criminals than Independents (40%) and Democrats (34%).

UPI posts, "80 percent in U.S. back death penalty."

While 83 percent in the United States support the death penalty for murder, 81 percent say innocent people likely have been executed, a poll indicated Tuesday.

Angus Reid Public Opinion reported the public is split on whether the threat of execution is a deterrent, with 39 percent agreeing and 35 percent saying no. Only 6 percent believe no innocent person has been put to death.

There were some regional and partisan differences with southerners slightly less likely to support the death penalty than others and independents less likely than either Democrats or Republicans.

A second disclaimer; more than 80% of all America's executions occur in the American South, and other polling has consitently shown higher levels of support in the South than in other regions of the country.

Related posts are in the public opinion polling index.

The Latest Gallup Polling

"In U.S., 64% Support Death Penalty in Cases of Murder," is the title of the summary at Gallup.  It's written by Frank Newport.  It contains numerous charts and graphics.

Gallup's annual Crime Survey finds that 64% of Americans continue to support the use of the death penalty for persons convicted of murder, while 29% oppose it -- continuing a trend that has shown little change over the last seven years.

Americans' views of the death penalty are particularly significant at this time, with several high-profile cases involving the death penalty in the news, including the imminent sentencing of convicted murderer Steven J. Hayes in Connecticut, a state in which only one person has been executed in the last 50 years.

Opponents of the death penalty continue to point out that DNA tests and other evidence have shown on numerous occasions that individuals sentenced to the death penalty were in fact innocent.

Despite the continuing controversy over the use of the death penalty, the attitudes of the average American on this issue have hardly changed in recent years. The current 64% support level is roughly equal to what Gallup has found through most of this decade.

This question about the death penalty in cases of murder is one of Gallup's oldest trends -- stretching back to 1936, when 59% of Americans supported the death penalty and 38% opposed it. Despite the similarity between today's attitudinal structure and what was found in 1936, there have been significant changes in the decades in between. At one point in 1994, 80% of Americans favored the death penalty, the all-time high on this measure. In 1966, 42% supported it, the all-time low.

And:

The use of the death penalty has been declining worldwide, with most of the known executions now carried out in five countries -- China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. Anti-death penalty groups in the U.S. continue to fight the use of the death penalty, particularly when there are high-profile instances of its use, such as this year's execution in Virginia of Teresa Lewis, the first woman to be executed in that state in almost 100 years. Despite this, Gallup's latest update in October shows no diminution in the strong majority level of support for the death penalty in cases of murder within the U.S.

Support for the death penalty can vary, depending on what the alternatives are, and also in reference to the specific circumstances of individual cases. For example, support drops to about half of the population when Americans are given the opportunity to choose the explicit alternative of life imprisonment with no possibility of parole. On the other hand, previous Gallup research has shown that in specific instances of highly visible, heinous crimes, support can rise to as high as 80%. That was the case when Gallup in 2001 asked Americans about the use of the death penalty for convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, whose actions resulted in the deaths of 168 people.

Related posts are in the public opinon polling index.

The Death Penalty and Connecticut Politics

Today's New York Times reports, "Murder Trial Puts Death Penalty in Spotlight in Connecticut Campaigns."  It's written by Paul Bass.

If Dannel P. Malloy’s gubernatorial campaign had the authority to set Connecticut’s court calendar, it probably would have scheduled the state’s most sensational murder trial for some other time. Like after Election Day.

As it is, the trial of Steven J. Hayes , one of two men accused of rape and murder in a Cheshire home invasion, has been riveting the state all fall, increasing the majority of voters who tell pollsters they support the death penalty.

Mr. Malloy is one of two Democrats in this fall’s two marquee races in Connecticut — for governor and United States Senate — who have called for the abolition of the death penalty. The other is Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic candidate for the Senate seat being vacated by Christopher J. Dodd.

The two candidates have ended up in different places and have taken different approaches this campaign season, as the Hayes trial kicked up questions about the death penalty and its enforcement.

In the 1980s, Mr. Blumenthal testified in the State Legislature in favor of abolishing Connecticut’s death penalty statute. He did so after representing a Florida death row inmate named Joseph Green Brown, who was wrongly convicted. Mr. Blumenthal succeeded in staving off the man’s execution just 15 hours before it was scheduled to take place.

That was then. At a news conference following a Senate campaign debate on Oct. 4. Mr. Blumenthal was asked about that position. He acknowledged it, then noted that as far back as 1990 his changed view had been on public record. “When I started running for attorney general, I supported the death penalty,” he said. “I’m a strong supporter now.”

Mr. Blumenthal argues that DNA advances since the 1980s have reduced the chances of false convictions.

Case closed. He and his Republican opponent, Linda McMahon, went back to trashing each other — she portrayed by Mr. Blumenthal as a heartless, outsourcing private employer hostile to the minimum wage, and he labeled by Ms. McMahon as a mendacious, clueless, job-killing career politician. No more talk about the death penalty.

In the governor’s race, on the other hand, Mr. Malloy never stops hearing about his opposition to the death penalty in light of the shocking murder of Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and her daughters Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, and the beating of their father, Dr. William A. Petit. When he held a news conference on expanding Connecticut’s ports, Mr. Malloy was asked about it. In debates and on the campaign trail, his Republican opponent, Thomas C. Foley, who supports the death penalty, makes sure to mention it and try to force him to reiterate his position.

Mr. Malloy has stuck by his opposition. He has promised to sign a bill to abolish the death penalty if elected. (One of his early supporters, State Representative Gary A. Holder-Winfield of New Haven, succeeded in getting such a bill passed in 2009, only to have Gov. M. Jodi Rell veto it.

According to a Quinnipiac University poll released last week, 65 percent of voters expressed support for the death penalty, up from 60 percent a year earlier. A mere 23 percent were opposed. More than three-quarters supported giving the Cheshire defendants the death penalty.

Here's coverage of last week's Quinnipiac polling.  "Support for Conn. death penalty hits 10-year high," is the AP post, via the New Haven Register.

Support for Connecticut's death penalty has reached its highest point in more than a decade, and even some who generally oppose capital punishment say it's appropriate for a man convicted in the 2007 deadly Cheshire home invasion, according to a new poll.

Quinnipiac University's poll, released Wednesday, found 65 percent of those surveyed support the death penalty. That's up from 61 percent two years ago, and the highest number since the year 2000.

It comes as Steven Hayes faces sentencing this month after being convicted of murder, rape and other charges for his part in the 2007 deaths of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters, Hayley and Michaela.

Prosecutors are asking jurors to send him to death row.

And:

The pollsters did not ask specifically about voters' views on Komisarjevsky's fate if he is convicted, though they found 98 percent of those surveyed had read about the case.

Three of every four people surveyed favored the death penalty for Hayes, with 18 percent against it and 6 percent undecided. Men were slightly more likely to support it than women.

There are 10 inmates on death row in Connecticut, though one awaits a new trial based on legal questions over whether a baby was born dead or alive after he killed its mother.

The last person executed in Connecticut was serial killer Michael Ross in 2005.

The General Assembly approved a ban in 2009 on imposing the death penalty for future convictions — which would have included Hayes — but not retroactively for death row inmates, whose cases are in various stages of appeals.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell vetoed the ban, saying the state cannot tolerate people who commit particularly heinous murders.

John Lender writes, "76% Back Death Penalty For Hayes, New Poll Shows," for the Hartford Courant.

Nearly two-thirds of Connecticut voters favor the death penalty for murder, in general, while even more think it's appropriate for Steven Hayes, who has been convicted of killing a Cheshire woman and her two daughters, a Quinnipiac University Poll released Wednesday shows.

The poll shows that 65 percent of those surveyed support the death penalty in general — slightly higher than in recent years, when support has "hovered" about 60 percent, Quinnipiac poll Director Douglas Schwartz said.

When asked specifically about Hayes, 76 percent said they support the death penalty. Hayes was found guilty Oct. 5 in the 2007 home invasion that resulted in the deaths of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11. Hayes now awaits the penalty phase of his trial, scheduled to begin Monday. Each of his six capital-felony convictions is punishable by death.

Schwartz said that "support for the death penalty in a specific case can be higher than support in general. This is because some voters who oppose the death penalty in general support it for a particularly heinous crime."

Support for the death penalty dipped when people were given the alternative of jailing murderers for life with no chance of parole, the poll showed. When asked which they preferred, 46 percent chose the death penalty, 41 percent said life without parole, and 14 percent didn't know or had no response.

The death penalty divides the two major-party candidates for governor, though only 6 percent of those polled said they would vote for governor based on that issue alone. Dannel Malloy, the Democrat, opposes the death penalty, and his opponent, Republican Tom Foley, favors it.

On October 10th, the Courant ran the editorial, "Repeal The Death Penalty."

When better to discuss the use of capital punishment in Connecticut than in the midst of a heated election campaign and a ghastly murder trial?

Both the Nov. 2 election for governor and the conviction last week of Steven Hayes in the horrific 2007 deaths of a mother and her two daughters in Cheshire will have a definitive impact on whether death by lethal injection continues to be a punishment option in this state

We hope that it does not — that lawmakers and the next governor can summon the courage to substitute life in prison without parole as the ultimate penalty for capital crimes.

And:

Finally, the death penalty puts the state in a morally compromised position. As horrible as some crimes are and as evil as many of the perpetrators may be, the state should not be in their same business, the business of death.

Better for society — and a worse punishment for the guilty — is to let the killer live with himself and his crime for life without hope of freedom.

Earlier coverage from Connecticut begins with this post.

California Public Opinion Polling

"Poll finds strong California support for death penalty," is the AP brief via the Silicon Valley Mercury News.

A new poll finds that 70 percent of Californians favor the death penalty.

The Field Poll released today shows support for executions has increased after a slight dip over the last decade.

Support is still lower than in the mid-1980s, when the death penalty was favored by as much as 83 percent of voters.

Executions resumed in California in 1977 after they were halted by the U.S. Supreme Court. There have been no executions in California since 2006 because of legal challenges to the lethal-injection procedures.

More than 700 inmates remain on death row.

Bob Egelko writes, "Field Poll finds 70% support death penalty," for the San Francisco Chronicle.

The survey of registered voters found 70 percent backing for capital punishment, up from 67 percent in the last statewide poll in 2006. Substantial majorities supported it, regardless of age, gender, race, religion or party. Twenty-four percent opposed the death penalty and 6 percent had no opinion.

But when a smaller number of voters were asked which sentence they preferred for a first-degree murderer, 42 percent said life in prison without parole and 41 percent said death. Another 13 percent said it would depend on the circumstances, and 4 percent had no opinion.

The last time the Field Poll asked that question, in 2000, it found that 44 percent chose the death penalty and 37 percent favored life without parole.

Field has been asking the broader question about capital punishment since 1956. In recent decades, support has ranged from a high of 83 percent in the mid-1980s to a low of 58 percent in 1971.

And:

The survey was released while candidates are preparing for a November election in which Attorney General Jerry Brown and San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidates for governor and attorney general, oppose the death penalty. Both say they will follow the law if elected.

The poll said 63 percent of Democrats, 82 percent of Republicans and 69 percent of third-party members and independents surveyed supported the death penalty. It was also backed by 60 percent of those who said they are likely to vote for Brown, and by 53 percent of Harris' supporters. Margins among supporters of their Republican opponents, Meg Whitman and Steve Cooley, were much wider.

When asked whether they preferred death or life without parole for murderers, however, respondents divided across party lines, with 56 percent of Democrats and 21 percent of Republicans opting for a life sentence.

The survey was conducted by telephone between June 22 and July 5. The question on support for capital punishment was asked of 1,390 voters; 485 of them were asked the question about the death penalty vs. life in prison for murderers.

The Press-Enterprise reports, "POLL: Voters favor death penalty."  It's written by Richard Deatley.

"There is a very large majority who want to have the penalty of death for some types of serious crime," said Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo. "That 70 percent represents an array of voters with different thresholds for using the death penalty. But they largely agree they would like to keep it."

Poll respondent Lora Hassani, a non-partisan voter who lives in the East Valley area of San Bernardino County, said she favored the death penalty but would let circumstances determine capital punishment or life in prison without parole.

"If there are five gang members involved in a shooting, in my opinion only the one that pulled the trigger should face the death penalty," said Hassani, who said she was on a jury that returned convictions in a non-death penalty murder trial earlier this year.

Related posts are in the public opinion polling index.  Thanks to Natasha Minsker for distributing.

California Politics and Capital Punishment

"Races could test voters' views on death penalty" is the title of Bob Egelko's front page article in today's San Francisco Chronicle.  Here's a brief excerpt:

For decades, capital punishment was a driving force in California politics, swaying elections for governor and the U.S. Senate and reshaping the state Supreme Court.

While executions in California have been on hold for more than four years, tied up in court challenges to lethal injection procedures that the state is now redrafting, November's elections may determine whether the death penalty still carries political weight.

The contrasts at the top of the major parties' tickets could not be starker.

Democrats Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris, the candidates for governor and attorney general, oppose capital punishment and have acted on their beliefs - Brown by vetoing a death penalty bill when he was governor in 1977, Harris by refusing to seek death sentences as San Francisco district attorney.

Their Republican opponents, Meg Whitman and Steve Cooley, support capital punishment. So do most Californians, according to Field Poll surveys going back half a century, although the majority has fallen from 83 percent in 1986 to 67 percent in 2006.

Earlier coverage from California begins with this post.

The Spectacle Doesn't Change the Facts

That's the title of Diann Rust-Tierney's latest commentary at Huffington Post.  LINK  Here's an extended excerpt:

Ronnie Lee Gardner's death by a Utah firing squad is an anomaly. Despite the curiosity generated by the high-profile manner of imposing the punishment, the death penalty is on the wane in America.

A new Rasmussen poll released June 8 shows that public support for the death penalty has declined. Three-quarters of Americans are concerned that some individuals are executed for crimes they did not commit, including 40% who are "very concerned."

So it is no small wonder that the death penalty is increasingly falling into disuse. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty less often, and jurors are returning death sentences less often as well. The active use of the death penalty is confined to a handful of states. Even in Utah, despite this splashy appearance on the executing stage, executions are very rare, with less than a dozen people on death row.

And the legal foundation upon which the system of capital punishment was built is crumbling. The American Law Institute played a pivotal role in the effort to design a capital sentencing scheme that comported with constitutional norms of due process and equal protection through its Model Penal Code. Tellingly, the ALI withdrew the Model Penal Code provision for capital punishment, citing its belief that the intractable problems of arbitrariness, bias and unfairness in the system could not be fixed.

We as a society need to learn to recognize the devastation and lifelong effect of homicides on families of murder victims and our communities. We need to find a response that better serves affected communities.

For our part, we will continue to tell the truth about the way in which capital punishment undermines and degrades our system of justice.

Rust-Tierney is the Executive Director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. 

Public Opinion Polling, Politics, and the Republican Primary Contest for Governor

The Texas Tribune has two recent posts of interest.  First, "The Polling Center: Voter Empathy," by Jim Henson.

"You've been in my life so long, I can't remember anything else," the beleaguered Ellen Ripley says wearily to one of the salivating creatures with whom she's realized a perversely intimate relationship (if you don't know, don't ask) in a scene in the third "Alien" movie. The Republican gubernatorial primary, now mere days away from a result, begins to feel like that.

It's been a long grind. Both publicly and privately, at first a lot of observers thought Perry unlikely to succeed in winning an unprecedented third gubernatorial election. Whether he crosses the 50% threshold or is forced into a run-off when the polls close next Tuesday, the results of the last UT/Texas Tribune Poll suggest that Rick Perry's synchronous orbit over a big chunk of the Republican primary electorate has helped him prove those observers, not to mention KBH boosters and donors, very wrong. The insiders may have thought the Senator was, as the well-traveled meme went, the most popular politician in Texas. Turns out Perry knew his target audience better than the Senator — and better than her supporters in the Republican donor pool, too.

From the early days of the race, many political insiders missed Perry's resonance with primary voters.

And, here is the detail:

Even potential areas of Perry vulnerability during the last year have come in areas where possible weaknesses turned out to be not only harmless, but perhaps even strengths. A significant Perry stumble in an earlier phase of the primary campaign — the handling of the Cameron Todd Willingham case and the machinations related to the Texas Forensics Science Commission — occurred in the safe territory of strong support for the death penalty. Our survey found, unsurprisingly, a huge wellspring of support for the death penalty: 53% of our overall sample strongly support it and 25% somewhat support it. Only 18% said they opposed it the death penalty to any degree. Ninety percent of Republican primary voters supported it.

More strikingly, this support for the death penalty is supplemented by an apparently widespread belief among Republican primary voters that the death penalty is administered fairly in Texas. When asked, "Generally speaking, do you believe the death penalty is applied fairly or unfairly in Texas today," 83% of Republican primary voters responded "fairly," with only 7% responding "unfairly." This unified public opinion about the legal process surrounding the death penalty very likely helped insulate Perry from any state-level consequences of the national criticism he received for his seemingly unshakable faith in a demonstrably shaky process and helped protect him from the Hutchison campaign's half-hearted attempts to charge him with cronyism while stepping softly around the specific issue of the Forensics Commission.

To many, situations like the Willingham affair bespeak a range of factors — a hapless Hutchison campaign, a feckless electorate, a continuing run of luck (to his most vituperative detractors, dumb luck) on Perry's part. There will be plenty of time to weigh all these things, because, much as many of us can't seem to recall life without the 2010 election, it's far from over: the primary voting is not done, there could be a run off, and there's a long hot summer of pivoting toward the November election. Some things seem clear right now, though: in a political season marked by politicians scrambling to connect with an unsettled, angry electorate, Rick Perry has not alienated his base; and when it comes to campaigns, as we are likely to witness in the November sequel, he can be quite the predator.

Emily Ramshaw writes, "The Buck Stops Where?" for today's Tribune.

The attack ad could write itself: On Gov. Rick Perry’s watch, Texas weathered a sexual abuse scandal at the Texas Youth Commission, fight clubs at state institutions for the disabled and deaths of kids monitored by Child Protective Services.

But three of the biggest messes of Perry’s 10-year tenure — two of which spurred U.S. Justice Department investigations — have been noticeably absent on the campaign trail. While U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Perry’s chief Republican primary opponent, has hit the airwaves on toll roads, immigration and education, she has largely steered clear of these high-profile social services debacles.  

And:

The one big social issue Hutchison has homed in on is Perry’s support for mandatory HPV vaccines for adolescent girls, but that issue is far more politically charged than the TYC or the state schools. Hutchison was silent on the Cameron Todd Willingham death penalty case, which looked to some like a high-profile fumble for Perry but would have jeopardized Hutchison’s already fragile relationship with Texas voters, who overwhelming favor the death penalty.

Recent Tribune polling on the death penalty is here; related posts, in the public opinion polling index.

New Texas Public Opinion Polling

Today's Texas Tribune continues reporting on the results of a University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll.  It's a fascinating snapshot of Texans and their attitudes on a variety of issues, with a definite focus on the March 2nd Democratic and Republican Party primaries.  Much more is in Ross Ramsey's  "Survey Says...," at the Tribune.

Support for the death penalty is still strong in Texas, with 53 percent strongly supporting it and another 25 pencent saying they "somewhat" support the death penalty. Well over half — 59 percent — say the death penalty is applied fairly in the state.

Here's a small overview from the beginning of the report:

Texans are worried about the economy and the direction of the country but generally think their own state, while it has its troubles, is in better shape economically and politically than the rest of the country, according to the new University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

The economy and related topics — unemployment/jobs and federal spending/national debt — are the top items on the list of Texans' concerns about the country, dominating all other issues in the survey. For 30 percent of those queried, the economy is the most important problem facing the U.S., followed by unemployment/jobs at 18 percent and federal spending/national debt at 16 percent. Health care is next, at 10 percent, followed by political corruption/leadership at 9 percent. Nothing else was above 5 percent.

Their take on the most important problems facing the state is different. Unemployment/jobs leads their list of state issues at 19 percent, followed by immigration at 16 percent, and the economy and border security each at 14 percent. No other issues break into double digits.

Related posts are in the public opinion polling index.

Innocents Executed?

In Monday's Democratic Party gubernatorial debate, businessman Farouk Shami stated that Texas has executed innocent people.  (See transcript, here; news coverage, here.)  He's taken some criticism for that assertion, most notably the Dallas Morning News editorial, noted here.

It's true that no executed Texas death row inmate has been proved innocent beyond everyone's doubts.  However, three cases have been investigated by journalists and there is credible evidence that these three men were innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted and executed.

One is obviously Todd Willingham, about whom a great deal has been written lately.  The original reporting on his case was done by Steve Mills and Maurice Possley in a 2004 Chicago Tribune series on junk science.  Their December 9, 2004 report was titled,"Man executed on disproved forensics."

David Grann's September 2009 New Yorker article is noted here.  The Beyler report prepared for the Forensic Science Commission is here in Adobe .pdf format. The Innocence Project has a Todd Willingham resource page which provides a concise overview of the Willingham case with links to all relevant documents.

Ruben Cantu was executed in 1993. The original reporting on his case was done by Lise Oleson of the Houston Chronicle in November 2005.  Sam Millsap, then the Bexar County District Attorney,  authorized the capital prosecution.  Millsap has since said that he has no reason to doubt the recantation by the sole eyewitness; that the individual had more to lose by recanting than remaining silent after the fact. 

Millsap has also said of the Cantu case, “I fervently hope that there are only a few prosecutors and former prosecutors in America today who find themselves, as I do, in the position of having to admit an error in judgment that may have led to the execution of an innocent man.”  Once a staunch supporter of capital punishment, Millsap now speaks out against the death penalty.

Carlos DeLuna was executed in 1989, also likely the victim of mistaken identification.  The primary reporting on the DeLuna case was also done by Mills and Possley in a Chicago Tribune series of articles in June 2006.  Former death house chaplain Carroll Pickett has written about DeLuna in his memoir Within These Walls, and believes he was innocent.  The documentary, At the Death House Door, includes DeLuna's story.

In 2001, Texas Defender Service issued it's report, A State of Denial: Texas Justice and the Death Penalty.  The report's Chapter 9, Bitter Harvest, examined the cases of six men executed by Texas in spite of serious questions of innocence at the time of their executions: David Wayne Spence, Robert Nelson Drew, Gary Graham, Odell Barnes Jr., Richard Wayne Jones, and David Stoker.  You can look at the case summaries at the link, in Adobe .pdf format.

Gary Graham, executed in 2000, was identified by a single eyewitness.  Other crime scene eyewitnesses did not identify him, and at least one of those who saw the crime positively excluded him as being the wrong height of the killer.  Graham's court-appointed lawyer apparently never read the police report, however, and never interviewed any of the crime scene witnesses.  Graham was tried when the quality of appointed trial counsel was too often worse than a disgrace. 

In Graham's photo lineup, his was the only photo of an African-American male with short hair and no facial hair, as the suspect was described; all the other individuals in the photo lineup had bushy hair and/or facial hair.  Graham's execution came before a great deal of the recent research on problems with eyewitness identification centered around human memory and the need for proper law enforcement procedures.  From the 250 DNA exonerations (capital and non-capital) chronicled by the Innocence Project, we now know that faulty eyewitness ID is the leading cause of wrongful convictions.  Graham and his attorneys fought for meaningful review of his case for more than seven years until his June 2000 execution.
 
Since the TDS report A State of Denial, Frances Newton was executed in 2005.  Gov. Perry issued a reprieve to allow for forensics testing on evidence (the dress she wore the night her husband and children were murdered.)  At issue was whether the material detected on her dress was nitrates from gun powder residue or nitrates from fertilizer.  The dress had been improperly stored, however, and contaminated with other evidence thus making the testing issue moot.  In spite of a very bloody crime scene, she had no blood or trace of blood on her, her clothing, or shoes the evening of the murder.   Her execution came shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf coast.  While her case had attracted media attention earlier, I believe that she was another victim of Katrina.

The Fall 2004 Scripps Howard Texas Poll showed that 70% percent of Texans believed that our state has executed innocent people.  That figure increased by 13 percentage points between 2000 and 2004.  Scripps Howard shuttered the poll shortly thereafter.

Some years ago retired State District Judge Jay Burnett, who presided over death penalty cases and was responsible for the creation of  the first standards for attorneys appointed to death penalty cases in Harris County, told NBC News Dateline: "There's no question in my mind that someone has slipped through the cracks and that there has been an innocent person executed."

One fact without dispute is that 11 former inmates of Texas' death row have been exonerated according to the Death Penalty Information Center. That's slightly more than one percent of the combined population of Texas death row and those executed in Texas.

I'm not writing to defend Shami's statement.  StandDown is nonpartisan and does not endorse political candidates.  His words, inelegantly stated, may have had more truth, however, than we can know or want to admit.

News Coverage of Smart on Crime

The Death Penalty Information Center's report Smart on Crime: Reconsidering the Death Penalty in a Time of Economic Crisis,  is garnering a great deal of news coverage, often with a local angle.

"Ending death penalty could save US millions: study," is the AFP report by Lucile Malandain.

Even when executions are not carried out, the death penalty costs US states hundreds of millions of dollars a year, depleting budgets in the midst of economic crisis, a study released Tuesday found.

"It is doubtful in today's economic climate that any legislature would introduce the death penalty if faced with the reality that each execution would cost taxpayers 25 million dollars, or that the state might spend more than 100 million dollars over several years and produce few or no executions," argued Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center and the report's author.

"Surely there are more pressing needs deserving funding," he wrote, noting that execution was rated among the least effective crime deterrents.

The Christian Science Monitor has, "Death peantly is too expensive for states, study finds," by Warren Richey.

State and local governments facing dire budget crunches can realize substantial savings by replacing capital punishment with a regime that sentences the worst offenders to life in prison without parole, according to a report released Tuesday by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).

The number of death sentences handed down in the United States has dropped from roughly 300 a year in the 1990s to 115 a year more recently. Executions are falling off at the same rate, the report says.

In the meantime, some 3,300 inmates remain on death row.

"[T]he death penalty is turning into a very expensive form of life without parole," said Richard Dieter, DPIC executive director, in a statement. "At a time of budget shortfalls, the death penalty cannot be exempt from reevaluation alongside other wasteful government programs that no longer make sense."

CNN: "Study: States can't afford death penalty," by Bill Mears.

A privately conducted poll of 500 police chiefs released with the report found the death penalty ranked last among their priorities for reducing violent crime. Only 1 percent found it to the best way to achieve that goal. Adding police officers ranked first.

The death row population in 2007, the most-recent statistic available from the Justice Department, was 3,220. It was at 2,250 two decades ago, but the numbers have not grown significantly since 2000.

Forty executions have occurred so far in 2009 in 10 states, all by lethal injection. That total is up from 37 for all of last year, but less than half of the high of 98, from 10 years ago. The Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

The Columbus Dispatch: "Death penalty not a deterrent, police chiefs say," by Alan Johnson.

The survey by RT Strategies of Washington found that 83 percent of police chiefs questioned still favor the death penalty, but the vast majority rank it near the bottom of crime-fighting strategies. Adding police officers, fighting drug abuse, longer prison sentences and improved crime databases all are higher priorities.

Similarly, about one in four police chiefs see executions as an efficient use of taxpayer dollars. However, 56 percent said they still prefer it to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The survey was conducted from Oct. 29 to Nov. 14, 2008, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 5.1 percentage points.

The Dayton Daily News: "Death penalty not efficient, police chiefs say," by Tom Beyerlein.

Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl said the study raises some legitimate concerns. DNA has shown some inmates have been falsely convicted, he noted, and he doesn’t believe the death penalty is a crime deterrent, but said it may be a just punishment for some heinous crimes.

“One question is, what are we trying to accomplish with the death penalty?” Biehl said. “If it’s deterrence, it doesn’t seem to get the job done at all. If it’s justice, that’s another question.”

“I think in some cases the death penalty is warranted. However, there are issues with the death penalty that need to be resolved, and I don’t think we can ignore the economic impact. The dollars we spend here, we can’t spend anywhere else.”

Kettering Police Chief James O’Dell said, “I don’t know if I can argue” with the study’s findings, but he does believe there’s a place for capital punishment as a deterrent and a punishment.

The Hartford Courant: "Killing people is just too expensive," by Susan Campbell.

The Kansas City Star: "Only 1 in 10 death sentences get carried out, report says."

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Death penalty no deterrent, police chiefs say," by Gabrielle Banks.Post-Gazette.

Overall, the officers ranked "more officers" as a top priority followed by reducing drug abuse. One percent of the chiefs interviewed ranked the death penalty as a top priority.

Fifty-seven percent of the chiefs said they did not view it as a deterrent to crime.

Dale Vietmeier, Robinson Police Chief and former president of the Allegheny County Chiefs of Police Association, agreed.

"I think law enforcement thinks it's a joke and that's probably why 1 percent thinks it's effective. It takes too long and there's too many people on death row that never get put to death," he said. He said he'd rank cutting drug addiction and boosting the number of officers as his top priorities.

The Wichita Eagle: "From a budget standpoint, is death row worth it?" by Ron Sylvester.

Kansas was one of 11 states that brought up measures in 2009 to abolish the death penalty.

The bill, which was tabled for study before a formal vote was taken, is expected to come back for consideration when the Legislature convenes in January.

“We’ve had the death penalty since 1994, and we continue to pay for the process with little results,” said state Sen. Carolyn McGinn, R-Sedgwick, who sponsored the bill. “But we continue to cut the programs that could prevent these types of crimes.”

Among the death penalty’s costs are more complex legal issues in cases that can take two years to go to trial, followed by a decade or more of appeals.

McGinn cited community corrections programs, along with prenatal care and programs to help young mothers, among those suffering from budget cuts.

“More important is to take that money (saved by abolishing the death penalty) and putting it into those preventative programs,” McGinn said.

The report released today cited audits in Kansas, North Carolina, Indiana and California, all of which show the death penalty is more expensive than cases that result in life prison sentences.

The 2003 audit in Kansas showed capital cases cost 70 percent more than non-capital murder cases.

Earlier coverage of  Smart on Crime: Reconsidering the Death Penalty in a Time of Economic Crisis  is here.

New Report From DPIC

The report is, Smart on Crime: Reconsidering the Death Penalty in a Time of Economic Crisis. 

The Death Penalty Information Center's news release is, "New Report Shows States Can Save Hundreds of Millions by Abolishing the Death Penalty.  National Poll of Police Chiefs Ranks the Death Penalty Last Among Crime-Fighting Priorities and Least Efficient Use of Taxpayers' Money."

A report released today by the Death Penalty Information Center concludes that states are wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on the death penalty, draining state budgets during the economic crisis and diverting funds from more effective anti-violence programs. A nationwide poll of police chiefs conducted by RT Strategies, released with the report, found that they ranked the death penalty last among their priorities for crime-fighting, do not believe the death penalty deters murder, and rate it as the least efficient use of limited taxpayer dollars.

"With many states spending millions to retain the death penalty, while seldom or never carrying out an execution, the death penalty is turning into a very expensive form of life without parole. At a time of budget shortfalls, the death penalty cannot be exempt from reevaluation alongside other wasteful government programs that no longer make sense," said Richard C. Dieter, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center and the report's author.

"The death penalty is a colossal waste of money that would be better spent putting more cops on the street. New Jersey threw away $250 million on the death penalty over 25 years with nothing to show for it. The death penalty isn't a deterrent whatsoever. New Jersey's murder rate has dropped since the state got rid of the death penalty. If other states abolished the death penalty, law enforcement wouldn't miss it and the cost savings could be used on more effective crime-fighting programs," said Police Chief James Abbott of West Orange, New Jersey. Abbott, a Republican, has served 29 years on the police force and was a member of the state commission that recommended the death penalty be abolished.

Key findings from the poll of police chiefs include:

• The death penalty was ranked last when the police chiefs were asked to name one area as "most important for reducing violent crime," with only one percent listing it as the best way to reduce violence. The death penalty came in behind more police officers; reducing drug abuse; better economy and more jobs; longer prison sentences; and technological innovations such as improved laboratories and crime databases.
• The police chiefs ranked the death penalty as the least efficient use of taxpayers' money. They rated expanded training and more equipment for police officers; hiring more police officers; community policing; more programs to control drug and alcohol abuse; and neighborhood watch programs as more efficient uses of taxpayers' dollars.
• Almost 6 in 10 police chiefs (57%) agreed that the death penalty does little to prevent violent crimes because perpetrators rarely consider the consequences when engaged in violence. Although the police chiefs did not oppose the death penalty in principle, less than half (47%) would support it if a sentence of life without parole with mandatory restitution to the victim's family were available.

"We need to stop wasting money on a broken death penalty and instead spend our limited resources on solving more homicides. My brother's murder has remained unsolved for more than six years. The death penalty won't bring my brother back or help to apprehend his murderer. We need to start investing in programs that will actually improve public safety and get more killers off the streets," said Judy Kerr of Albany, California.

The extra costs of the death penalty, beyond life sentences, are often $10 million per year per state. If a state spent that $10 million on hiring new police officers (or teachers) at $40,000 per year, it could afford to hire 250 additional workers.

California spends $137 million per year on the death penalty and has not had an execution in almost four years, even as the state pays its employees in IOUs and releases inmates early to address overcrowding and budget shortfalls. In Florida, where the courts have lost 10 percent of their funding, the state spends $51 million dollars per year on the death penalty or $24 million for each execution.

Executions themselves are not expensive; it is the pursuit of the death penalty that carries a high price tag. The higher costs of the death penalty process -- including the costs of higher security on death row -- are unavoidable and likely to increase in light of all the mistakes that have been made in capital cases.

In 2009, 11 state legislatures (Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Texas and Washington) considered abolition bills. New Mexico abolished the death penalty and Maryland narrowed its application with costs as an issue in both states.

Both houses of the Connecticut legislature voted to end the death penalty and one house of the Montana and Colorado legislatures (where cost savings were to be allocated to solving cold cases) passed abolition bills. The trend of states reexamining the death penalty in light of the economic crisis is expected to continue.

The poll of 500 randomly-selected police chiefs was conducted from October 29 to November 14, 2008 by RT Strategies with a margin of error of +/- 5.1 for all elites. The results of the poll were publicly released for the first time today.

I'll have a roundup of news coverage later today.

Former Governor Mark White Calls for Texas Death Penalty Review

"Review death penalty law, ex-governor urges," is the title of R.G. Ratcliffe's report in today's Houston Chronicle.

Former Gov. Mark White, who was involved in the executions of 20 condemned criminals, says it may be time for Texas to do away with the death penalty.

The death penalty is no longer a deterrent to murder, and long stays for the condemned on death row shows justice is not swift, White said.

More than anything, he said, he has grown concerned that the system is not administered fairly and that there are too many risks of executing innocent people.

White said the state needs to take a serious look at replacing the death penalty with life without parole.

“There is a very strong case to be made for a review of our death penalty statutes and even look at the possibility of having life without parole so we don't look up one day and determined that we as the state of Texas have executed someone who is in fact innocent,” said White.

And:

Noting that he does not know all the facts in the Willingham case, White said it shows how forensic science is evolving. White said there also has been at least one case of a death row inmate being cleared by modern DNA testing. That was the case of Michael Blair, a child sex offender who was convicted of killing Ashley Estell after a playground abduction, but exonerated when DNA testing indicated someone else likely was involved.

“That's two examples of why I think the system is so unreliable it creates an unnecessary possibility that an innocent person would be executed in Texas. And I don't think anybody in Texas wants that to happen,” White said.

The former Democratic governor also said he was upset by the incident in 2007 when the Court of Criminal Appeals was closed to an inmate's efforts to file a last-minute appeal based on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that came down earlier in the day of his execution. That case has resulted in a State Judicial Conduct Commission investigation of Presiding Judge Sharon Keller.

“That was a horrible procedural error,” White said.

White, as attorney general in 1982, represented the state in the first execution after the death penalty was reinstated. As governor from 1983 to 1987, he oversaw 19 executions.

White said during his tenure as governor, then-Attorney General Jim Mattox was in Huntsville and he remained by the telephone in case an execution needed to be halted at the last minute. White said none of the cases he handled involved claims of innocence.

White said he is not critical of Perry's handling of the Willingham case and would not second guess him.

Wayne Slater writes, "Arson case adds new twist to Texas candidates' death penalty stance," for the Dallas Morning News.

As the debate over whether the state executed an innocent man spills over into the governor's race, Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison are operating by a longtime rule of Texas politics: Don't mess with the death penalty.

Perry defends the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham and assures conservative voters who will decide the Republican primary that the state's system of capital punishment is sound.

Hutchison's task is more complicated. She argued that Perry, by politicizing the investigation, poses a threat to the death penalty by casting a cloud over the system.

History shows that in Texas, it's nearly impossible to be elected to statewide office without supporting capital punishment.

Polls show that nearly three-quarters of Texans support it, and the numbers are even higher among conservative Republicans.

But even among Democrats, support for the death penalty is a virtual requirement. In the robust Democratic primary in 1990, all three candidates tried to outdo each other on their willingness to execute the bad guys.

"There's a strong law-and-order tradition in Texas," said Corey Ditslear, a professor at the University of North Texas who specializes in judicial politics. "It's a frontier state, a breakaway from Mexico that charted its own path by maintaining law and order."

The Willingham investigation, though, could introduce an element that all candidates dislike: unpredictability.

And:

In 1990, Democrats seeking their party's gubernatorial nomination competed with each other over who was responsible for sending more people to the death chamber.

Ann Richards fended off a commercial in which Jim Mattox accused her of being the choice of Texas death-row inmates.

Mattox touted the fact that he attended most executions as attorney general and helped redesign how officials carried out the death penalty.

And former Gov. Mark White aired a commercial taking personal responsibility for those executed during his tenure.

Walking among the black-and-white portraits of men put to death, White said: "As governor, I made sure they received the ultimate punishment – death."

White, now a lawyer in Houston and the only one of the three Democratic candidates still living, said he supported capital punishment every time he ran for office but no longer does because of the risk of a mistake.

"We're very tough on crime in Texas," he said. "But as tough as old Mark was on crime and for the death penalty, when I review it today, I have very, very serious reservations about trusting our system of government making the right decision every time and not executing an innocent person."

Ditslear said that erosion of public support is reflected in polls. A 2007 poll conducted by Sam Houston State University, found that while 74 percent of Texans support the death penalty, that's down from 80 percent in 2001.

The commercials that Wayne Slater mentioned received so much attention that Saturday Night Live parodied them, a tough task given their already over the top nature.

Slater has more on the Trail Blazers blog at the DMN website, "Long time supporter ex-Gov. Mark White now doubts death penalty."

"Every time I ran for office I was for the death penalty. If I were running for office now, I would tell you that I think the system is not secure enough to make certain that we're not going to execute an innocent person at some future date. And therefore, I think we should see changes made to minimize that possibility. And that may include not having a death penalty but having life without parole."

White, a Democrat, took care to say he's not being critical of Republican Gov. Rick Perry, who has defended his actions in the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham. But, as a lawyer, White said he's grown increasingly anxious about "the frailty of the system."

"We need a statewide lab. We need a lab that is completely independent of law enforcement. And we need one that will give a straight opinion as to whether this evidence is what it says it is or isn't. I have sincere questions about it. And today, I would much prefer that we put people in life without parole than see the prospect of one innocence person executed."

AP is distributing, "Ex-governor White urges rethink of death penalty," this morning, via the San Antonio Express-News.

There is a very strong case to be made for a review of our death penalty statutes and even look at the possibility of having life without parole so we don't look up one day and determine that we, as the state of Texas, have executed someone who in fact was innocent," he said.

White was the state attorney general in 1979-1983 and governor in 1983-1987 and was involved with 20 executions in both capacities.

Earlier Willingham coverage begins with the preceding post; related post in politics.

The Latest National Death Penalty Numbers From Gallup

"In U.S., Two-Thirds Continue to Support Death Penalty.  Little change in recent years despite international opposition," is the title of Frank Newport's narrative of the polling results.

Gallup's annual Crime Survey finds that 65% of Americans continue to support the use of the death penalty for persons convicted of murder, while 31% oppose it -- continuing a trend that has shown little change over the last six years.

"For many Americans, agreement with the assertion that innocent people have been put to death does not preclude simultaneous endorsement of the death penalty."
Opponents of the death penalty have pointed out that just five countries -- China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States -- carry out most of the known executions around the world, and that the number of countries that still allow the death penalty has been dwindling. Despite these worldwide trends, Gallup's annual October update on Americans' attitudes toward the death penalty shows no diminution in support for state-sanctioned executions in cases of murder. The current 65% support level is roughly equal with what has been measured for most of this decade.

Gallup's death-penalty data stretch back more than seven decades -- making attitudes toward the death penalty one of Gallup's oldest trends. Gallup's earliest reading, in 1936, found that 59% of Americans supported the use of the death penalty in cases of murder, compared to 38% who opposed it. The all-time high level of 80% support came in September 1994, just before the midterm elections that swept Democrats out of power and at a time when Americans most often cited crime as the most important problem facing the nation. The low points came in the period of time from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s. During some of this time, the death penalty was illegal, and support dropped as low as 42% in 1966.

And:

Another argument against the death penalty focuses on cases in which it has been shown that innocent people have been put to death. The finality of execution obviously precludes the possibility of redress if, at some later point, DNA or other evidence finds that the individual in question was wrongly convicted of his or her crime. The American public would appear to be somewhat sympathetic to this argument: this year's poll finds 59% of Americans agreeing that within the last five years, "a person has been executed under the death penalty who was, in fact, innocent of the crime he or she was charged with." A little less than a third disagree.

However, for many Americans, agreement with the assertion that innocent people have been put to death does not preclude simultaneous endorsement of the death penalty. A third of all Americans, 34%, believe an innocent person has been executed and at the same time support the death penalty. This is higher than the 23% who believe an innocent person has been executed and simultaneously oppose the death penalty.

Looked at differently, the data show that 57% of those who believe an innocent person has been executed also support the death penalty. This is significantly higher than the 39% who hold this belief and (perhaps more consistently) oppose the death penalty.

And:

Gallup research has found that support for the death penalty is lower if Americans are offered an explicit alternative -- "life imprisonment, with absolutely no possibility of parole." In May 2006, for example, 65% of Americans supported the death penalty in general (matching the current figure), while, separately, 47% said they preferred the death penalty to life imprisonment as a penalty for murder when given that choice (48% favored life imprisonment).

Related posts are in the public opinion polling index.

California and the Death Penalty - New Public Opinion Polling

"Californians' support for death penalty waning," is the title of Carol Williams' report in today's Los Angeles Times.

A majority of Californians still favor the death penalty, but their support has waned from 79% to 66% over the last two decades as fears of executing the wrongly convicted escalate, a researcher reported Tuesday.

The survey conducted by Craig Haney, a UC Santa Cruz psychology professor and lawyer, also showed that most Californians erroneously believe that it costs taxpayers less to execute condemned prisoners than to keep them locked up for life.

In California, it costs $138,000 a year to incarcerate each of San Quentin State Prison's 685 death row inmates, nearly three times the non-capital inmate cost, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The average stay on death row is 25 years and growing as legal challenges have kept executions on hold for 3 1/2 years and limited the number to 13 since capital punishment was restored in 1976.

"My sense is that the whole issue of the death penalty is much more unsettled now than it has been in the past 20 or so years," said Haney, citing growing public discomfort with incidents in which innocent prisoners have been spared at the last minute -- or not at all.

And:

In his study, Haney also found a sharp decline in respondents who consider the death penalty a deterrent. While 74% thought it had deterrent value in Haney's analogous 1989 survey, that was down to 44% this year.

Another important shift in public opinion, he said, has been a rise in the number of people who believe that sentencing a murderer to life without the possibility of parole really means imprisonment until death. Support for the death penalty plunged to 26% when respondents were offered the alternative of guaranteed life imprisonment and the requirement that the offender work to pay restitution to victims and their families, Haney said.

Those who advocate retaining the death penalty argue that support for capital punishment has been stable in recent years, that only the interpretation of survey data is changing.

"There hasn't been any major falloff," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which takes a conservative stance on penal issues.

And:

Haney's findings were consistent with those of last month's Field Poll of the California electorate, in which 67% of respondents expressed support for the death penalty.

The professor queried 800 jury-eligible Californians in February and March for his survey. It was funded by the National Jury Project and carried out by the Survey Research Center at the University of Virginia, with a 3.5% margin of error.

"New poll by UCSC professor reveals declining support for the death penalty," is the title of a news release from UC Santa Cruz, written by Jennifer McNulty.  Here's an extended excerpt:

Although a majority of Californians still favor the death penalty, a new public-opinion poll by a UC professor reveals that support for capital punishment has eroded significantly since 1989, the last time a detailed statewide survey on the topic was conducted.

Sixty-six percent of 800 respondents in the new poll expressed support for the death penalty, compared to 79 percent in 1989, according to the survey, which was conducted by Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Haney's findings are consistent with the findings of a recent statewide Field Poll that asked one question about capital punishment. Sixty-seven percent of respondents to that survey support the death penalty, the Field Poll found.

But Haney's survey provides the first detailed picture of Californians' attitudes about the death penalty in 20 years. A follow-up to a nearly identical statewide survey Haney conducted in 1989, the new study identifies some of the factors that might help to explain declining support.

"What's significant about the recent decline is that it occurred primarily among the strongest supporters of the death penalty," said Haney, a leading scholar on capital punishment and author of the book Death by Design.

The proportion of adult Californians who view themselves as "strong" supporters of the death penalty has dropped from 50 percent in 1989 to 38 percent today. Conversely, fewer than 9 percent were "strongly opposed" to capital punishment 20 years ago, compared to 21 percent today.

"These changes appear to be related to changes in the way Californians view the system of death sentencing, rather than just the punishment itself," said Haney.

For example, the poll revealed much greater concern about the possibility of executing innocent people: 44 percent expressed concern this year, compared to only 23 percent in 1989. In addition, the number of respondents who believe the death penalty is a deterrent to murder dropped from 74 percent in 1989 to only 44 percent today. Similarly, the number of people who did not believe that prisoners sentenced to life without parole would actually stay in prison until they died dropped to about 40 percent, compared to 66 percent who held that belief in 1989.

"There is a higher level of accurate understanding today that life in prison without the possibility of parole is the real alternative to the death penalty under California law," said Haney, noting that no prisoner under that sentence has ever been paroled or pardoned in California.

Although Californians are somewhat more knowledgeable about the death penalty today than they were 20 years ago, some misconceptions persist. For example, Haney found that nearly half the respondents in the 2009 survey, compared to 54 percent in 1989, thought the death penalty is cheaper to implement than life without parole, although the reverse is true.

Related posts are in the public opinion polling category index.

The Latest From Gallup

"Special Report: Ideologically, Where Is the U.S. Moving?" is by Linda Saad of Gallup.
This polling covers a wide array of issues and broad themes examining differences between 2004 polling and polling conducted in 2008/2009. The executive summary could be: As measured by Gallup, national support for the death penalty is at 64%, the same level of support as Gallup found in 2004. Or, as stated in the narrative:

Public opinion on several other domestic policy issues did not change appreciably -- including on the death penalty and labor unions.

Here's an extended excerpt from the introduction:

Despite the results of the 2008 presidential election, Americans, by a 2-to-1 margin, say their political views in recent years have become more conservative rather than more liberal, 39% to 18%, with 42% saying they have not changed. While independents and Democrats most often say their views haven't changed, more members of all three major partisan groups indicate that their views have shifted to the right rather than to the left.

These findings, from a June 14-17 Gallup Poll, somewhat conform to Gallup's annual trends on Americans' self-defined political ideology. Thus far in 2009 (from January through May), 40% of Americans call themselves conservative, up from 37% in 2007 and 2008, and the highest level since 2004.

However, the results are conspicuously incongruous with the results of the 2008 elections, in which the Democratic Party won the White House for the first time in eight years, and increased its majority control in the U.S. House and Senate. Rather than suggesting an upturn in conservatism, the elections, the tattered image of the GOP, depressed identification with the Republican Party, and President Obama's broad popularity have many in and outside of the Republican Party wondering whether the country has outgrown the GOP's largely conservative platform.

Conservatives currently outnumber liberals in the population, and thus, conservatism has a natural advantage on any question asking the public to choose between these standard ideological labels. So that's part of the explanation for the incongruity.

Indeed, in the latest survey, 38% of Americans describe their political views as conservative, and among this group 58% say their views have grown more conservative in recent years. Although a large segment of liberals (42%) say they have become more liberal, far fewer Americans in the poll (18%) describe themselves as liberal -- thus providing little counterweight to the rightward movement of conservatives. At the same time, political moderates are twice as likely to say they have grown more conservative as opposed to more liberal (33% vs. 18%), thus further tipping the scales in favor of conservatism.

While it is valuable to know how Americans perceive their own ideological development, another means for evaluating such change is to assess how public opinion may have shifted on specific issues over the years.

Given the stark differences between the current political scene and the one surrounding the 2004 elections, 2004 represents a good comparison point for this analysis. Not only was there a five-point drop between 2004 and 2008 (from 51% to 46%) in the popular vote for the Republican presidential candidate, but there has been a similar drop (from 45% in 2004 to 40% in 2008 and 39% in 2009) in the percentage affiliating themselves with the Republican Party.

Have Americans' positions on major cultural, social, and policy issues shifted left accordingly? A broad review of the available trends suggests not. However, they have not shifted solidly right either, countering Americans' claims in the new poll that they have grown more conservative.

Related articles are in StandDown's public opinion polling category index.

New Public Opinion Polling

"Americans Pick Death Penalty for Murder Cases," is from Angus Reid Global Monitor.

Many adults in the United States believe capital punishment is a better penalty for murder, according to a poll by Opinion Research Corporation released by CNN. 53 per cent of respondents choose the death penalty, while 46 per cent select life imprisonment with absolutely no possibility of parole.

In addition, only 26 per cent of respondents believe that the death penalty should be considered as "cruel and unusual" punishment.

Since 1976, 1,167 people have been put to death in the United States, including 31 this year. More than a third of all executions have taken place in the state of Texas. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia do not engage in capital punishment.

And:

If you could choose between the following two approaches, which do you think is the better penalty for murder?

The death penalty:  53%
Life imprisonment with absolutely no possibility of parole:  46%
Not sure :  2%

As you may know, according to the U.S. Constitution, any punishment that is considered "cruel and unusual" cannot be used on people convicted of any crime. Do you consider the death penalty to be a cruel and unusual punishment, or don’t you feel that way?"

Yes:  26%
No:  73%
Not sure:  1%

The support numbers in the CNN polling is down markedly from Gallup polling of last year, noted here; a difference that might have to do with the way the question was asked, or may reflect decreasing support for capital punishment.  StandDown's public opinion polling index has related articles.  I'll be watching for more from CNN.

Polling in Connecticut

"Q-Poll: Connecticut Strongly Backs Death Penalty," is Daniela Altimari's report for the Hartford Courant.

By a two to one margin, Connecticut voters once again say the state should keep the death penalty.

A Quinnipiac University poll released this morning found that 61 percent support the death penalty, while 34 percent believe it should be replaced with life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The survey of 1,575 registered voters comes on the heels of a historic vote in the legislature to repeal capital punishment in the state. Gov. M. Jodi Rell has vowed to veto the measure.

The latest poll is consistent with previous surveys that showed a similar level of support for capital punishment.

And:

Lawmakers who support abolition say the death penalty doesn't work in Connecticut: only one person, convicted serial killer Michael Ross, has been put to death in the past 49 years and that was only after he waged a legal battle to do so. They said the endless appeals are frustrating and unfair to family members of victims.

But Rell has been steadfast in her belief that some crimes are so atrocious, the death penalty is warranted.

The Day carries the AP report, "Poll: 3 in 5 Conn. residents support death penalty."

The Quinnipiac University Poll found 61 percent of those surveyed supported capital punishment and did not want it replaced with life in prison without parole for convicted murderers.

The Democrat-led General Assembly this month approved legislation abolishing the death penalty, but Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell has vowed to veto it. She has said capital punishment is appropriate for certain heinous crimes, a sentiment shared by many in the new poll.

The percentage of Connecticut residents who support the death penalty has changed little over the past several years.

The last poll, in November 2007, found that 63 percent supported the death penalty for convicted murderers. In 2001, 60 percent supported it.

Director Douglas Schwartz said the new poll shows public opinion is on Rell's side as she prepares to veto the bill that sharply split Connecticut's General Assembly this month.

And:

Among those who favored capital punishment, 23 percent said in response to an open-ended question that the death penalty provides retribution and/or fair punishment. Another 22 percent said it is appropriate for severe or heinous crimes.

Among its opponents, 23 percent said no one has the right to take a human life, and 15 percent said they fear the possibility that an innocent person could be executed.

Ten convicted murderers currently sit on Connecticut's death row.

Coverage of Connecticut's repeal legislation and the governor's veto vow begins with this post.

The Latest Gallup Numbers

"American Hold Firm to Support for Death Penalty," is the Gallup report with polling data gathered October 3rd - 5th.  It includes numerous graphs.  Here's an excerpt from the narrative:

Last week's recommendation by a Maryland commission that the state's death penalty law be repealed contrasts with broad U.S. public support for the punishment. According to Gallup's annual Crime survey in October, 64% favor of Americans favor the death penalty for someone convicted of murder, while just 30% oppose it.

In addition to the majority of Americans who support the death penalty, nearly half (48%) believe it is not imposed often enough. Only 21% of Americans say it is imposed too often, with a nearly equal number, 23%, saying it is imposed about the right amount of time.

The death penalty is favored by most Republicans nationwide, but it also receives the general support of a solid majority of independents and more than half of Democrats.

In its preliminary report -- the final report will be issued next month -- the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment cited evidence that the death penalty does not act as a deterrent to crime, and that it is racially biased in its application. Americans don't share the same view on at least one of these arguments. The slight majority of Americans in the Oct. 3-5, 2008, poll -- 54% -- say they believe the death penalty is applied fairly in the country today -- a rough indication that Americans don't perceive bias to be a major problem with the death penalty system.

On the other hand, previous Gallup research has found that most Americans believe the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime. According to a May 2006 Gallup Poll, only 34% said it was a deterrent, while 64% disagreed. Open-ended questions asked in previous years have shown that most Americans who favor the death penalty do so because they believe it provides an "eye for an eye" type of justice.

Although the current 64% support for capital punishment is high, support is a bit lower than it has been at other times over the past decade, when 69% or 70% were in favor. Those readings, in turn, are lower than the ones from the 1980s and 1990s, when support averaged 75%. The highest individual measure of public support for the death penalty in Gallup's records is 80%, recorded 14 years ago in September 1994.

Death penalty support was substantially lower from the late 1950s through the early 1970s.

The public opinion polling index is here.

No End In Sight to Death Penalty Wrangling

That's the title of an excellent Stateline.org roundup on current capital punishment issues.  It's written by John Gramlich and contains a number of charts and graphs.  LINK  Here's an excerpt from the beginning of this lengthy article.

More than 30 years after it was reinstated by the nation’s highest court, the death penalty in the United States still faces serious legal and political challenges, even as a persistent majority of the American public believes convicted murderers should be executed.

The United States is among a handful of industrialized countries to sanction capital punishment, and it has executed more than 15,000 people since colonial days. More than 1,100 prisoners have been put to death since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for executions to resume following a decade-long national hiatus.

But while the death penalty today stands as a fixture of American criminal justice, authorized by the federal government and 36 states, its use has declined steadily in recent years as it has run into a host of obstacles in state capitals and in the courts. 

The Supreme Court, always at the center of the nation’s debate over the death penalty, this year sought to resolve long-running disputes over how and when executions can be carried out. But a pair of landmark decisions — one upholding lethal injection and the other outlawing the death penalty for those who rape children but do not murder them — exposed sharp divisions in the public, among politicians and on the high court itself over when, if ever, capital punishment is appropriate. 

Meanwhile, the justices’ April decision to uphold lethal injection did not immediately resolve the debate over the controversial procedure. Executions by that method remained on hold in many parts of the country, and lawyers for death-row inmates quickly filed appeals based on what they saw as new avenues included in the high court’s ruling.

In the states, which carry out almost all U.S. executions, legislative activity and more court rulings have narrowed where the death penalty can be used. In December 2007, New Jersey became the first state in more than 40 years to abolish capital punishment legislatively, while the Nebraska Supreme Court in February struck down the electric chair — the state’s only method of execution — as unconstitutional “torture.” The decision left the state with the death penalty but no legal means of carrying it out.

Earlier Stateline reports of interest are highlighted here and here,

An Evangelical Voice on Baze

Scott Kincaid writes, "Deadly 'Cocktail' Is Beside the Point," at Evangelicals for Social Action.

But legal and public opinion, even Christian opinion, is not the sole or primary source for discerning which public policy choices disciples of Jesus should support. Ever since Jesus disarmed the religiously proper henchmen during the execution of the adulterous woman—at the time a crime widely thought to be properly deserving of the death penalty—he pronounced capital punishment improper. This act was clearly consistent with the radical idea of enemy love that Jesus preached and lived. Capital punishment is the ultimate violation of Jesus’ exhortation to love enemies.  And there are nonviolent, effective ways of protecting society from those who have murdered, such as long-term imprisonment.  These nonviolent ways of addressing the problem of violent crime are consistent with Jesus’ command to love neighbor AND enemy.

The degree of risk of pain is really beside the point.

The religion index is here.  There is a Faith Community webroll in the left-column.  Thanks to David Whettstone for forwarding this.

Latest Harris Interactive Polling on Death Penalty

Harris Interactive has released its latest polling on death penalty attitudes.  A news release, via Business Wire, is here; it includes several tables.

Over the past few years there have been many high profile cases where those on death row have been found to be innocent and some states have halted executions. In the minds of Americans, this may have had an impact as the number of those who believe in the death penalty has declined since 2003. Currently, 63 percent of Americans believe in the death penalty while three in ten (30%) are opposed to it. Five years ago, almost seven in ten (69%) believed in it while 22 percent were opposed to it. In 1965, when The Harris Poll^® first started asking this question, just under half of Americans (47%) were opposed to the death penalty while 38 percent believed in it.        

These are some of the results of a Harris Poll of 1,010 adults surveyed by telephone between February 5 and 11, 2008 by Harris Interactive^®.

Death Penalty as a Deterrent
One question with regard to the death penalty is whether or not it serves as a deterrent to others. Just over half (52%) of Americans believe that executing people who commit murder does not have much effect on deterring others from committing murder. Two in five (42%) say that executing people does deter others from committing murder. These numbers are almost identical to 2003 as well as 2001, so attitudes on this issue appear to be holding steady. However, this is a difference from 1976. Then, almost six in ten (59%) believed executing people deterred others while one-third (34%) believed that it did not have much effect.

Change in Number of Executions
When it comes to whether people would like to see an increase or decrease in the number of convicted criminals who are executed, there is a bit of a divide among Americans. Just over one-third (36%) believe there should be an increase while one-quarter (26%) say there should be a decrease and three in ten (31%) believe there should be no change. While the number of Americans who believe there should be an increase has not changed since 2003, the number of those saying a decrease has increased from 21 percent. Looking back a decade, in 1997 over half (53%) of Americans believed there should be an increase and just 14 percent said a decrease in the number of executions.    

Convictions of Innocent People for Murder    
There is one issue almost all Americans agree on – 95 percent of U.S. adults say that sometimes innocent people are convicted of murder while only 5 percent believe that this never occurs. This is a number that has held steady since 1999. Among those who believe innocent people are sometimes convicted of murder, when asked how many they believe are innocent, the average is 12 out of 100 or 12 percent. In looking at this by race and ethnicity, African Americans believe more innocent people are convicted than both Whites and Hispanics (25% versus 9% and 12% respectively). Democrats also believe more innocent people are convicted than Republicans (15% versus 6%).    

Now, among this large group who believe innocent people are sometimes convicted of murder, the question becomes does this change the minds of people on the death penalty. When asked to suppose they believed that quite a substantial number of innocent people are convicted of murder, over half (58%) say they would then oppose the death penalty while just over one-third (35%) would believe in it. One impact of the recent cases in the news may be the change over time on this question. In 2000, over half (53%) of those who believe innocent people are convicted of murder said they would believe in the death penalty while 36 percent said they would oppose it.

The public opinion polling index is here.

Capital Doubts

That's the title of an article at Christianity Today.  LINK

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments against Kentucky's lethal injection procedure in January, as attorneys for two death row inmates contended that when done incorrectly, the procedure—which involves three shots to numb, paralyze, and kill—can cause extreme pain to the prisoner.

While the issue before the Supreme Court is narrow, the national mood on capital punishment itself seems to be shifting. New Jersey became the 14th state to outlaw executions in December 2007. And a Pew Forum poll taken last August found that public support for capital punishment has dropped to 62 percent from a high of 80 percent in 1994. White evangelicals are still the death penalty's strongest supporters, with 74 percent approval, but that is down from 82 percent in 1996.

Some Christians have been disturbed by the disproportionate number of poor and African American prisoners on death row, said John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, a conservative civil liberties organization. According to a January poll done by NationalChristianPoll.com, a research service of CT parent company Christianity Today International, about two-thirds of active Christians who oppose capital punishment are troubled by mistakes in the legal system that could lead to the execution of innocent people.

"It's anti-evangelical to kill people," Whitehead said. "Christianity is redemptive. But you can't redeem people by extinguishing them." Whitehead believes opposition to the death penalty will gain momentum in the future. "Young Christians are seeing right away that, hey, the meek and mild Jesus—would he pull the lever? Would he put the hood on and pull the lever? I don't think so."

The numbers may support Whitehead's theory. Only 55 percent of Americans ages 18–29 support the death penalty, according to David Masci of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. But Masci isn't ready to call it a trend. "I don't think we can tell," he said. The live-and-let-live attitude of youth may change as they get older, he said.

Masci said support for capital punishment has fluctuated during the past half-century. Briefly, during the 1960s, more Americans opposed executions than supported them. But the next three decades saw a steady rise in support, with approval peaking in the 1990s.