What Americans Don't Understand About the Death Penalty

That's the title of Andrew Cohen's latest writing on capital punishment at the Atlantic.  It's subtitled, "Support for capital punishment has hit an all-time low, according to a new Gallup poll. But the public still has a lot to learn about how unjustly the sentence is applied."

Here's the beginning of this must-read:

The folks at Gallup released the results of a new poll yesterday about the death penalty in America under the headline: "U.S. Death Penalty Support Lowest in 40 Years." Given the arbitrary way in which capital punishment is administered today in America, that's the good news. Evidently it is dawning on more and more people that the death penalty, as now applied by our judges and juries, is broken, in ways large and small, and thus unworthy of support.

The bad news, however, is that public attitudes about the death penalty today remain wildly disconnected from the reality of the death penalty today. This represents a failure of our courts, and of journalists and advocates, to adequately explain the grim truths about capital punishment. And it represents a failure by millions of Americans to level with themselves, and with each other, about what the death penalty is and is not.

Let me focus briefly here on two of the more disheartening results from the Gallup poll. Here's one:

Fifty-two percent of Americans believe the death penalty is applied fairly in the United States -- a smaller figure than the 60% who favor the death penalty. Forty percent believe the death penalty is applied unfairly. Gallup first asked this question in 2000, when the Illinois moratorium on the death penalty made headlines. At that time, 51% said the death penalty was applied fairly, which remains the low point in the 14-year trend. In 2004, a high of 61% said the death penalty was applied fairly.

This means that more than half of those surveyed are—let me be delicate—still tragically misinformed about the nature of capital punishment in America in 2013. The truth is that race plays an enormous role in determining who is and who is not sentenced to death in America. If you are black you stand a far higher chance of getting the death penalty, especially if your victim is white. The evidence and analysis of this fact are so pervasive that it should be beyond debate: 52 percent of Americans are dead wrong in their perception of the fairness of the application of capital punishment.

The New Republic posts a great infographic in Jennifer Kirby's report, "Death Penalty Support vs. Violent Crime: Two Graphs With Very Similar Arcs."

Gallup released a poll Tuesday showing that 60 percent of Americans favor capital punishment—the lowest rate in nearly 40 years. This comes about a month after the FBI released its 2012 national crime statistics, the latest data point in a long-term reduction in violent crime since the early 1990s. As the two graphs below show, these two figures have similar trajectories. So does violent crime influence public support for the death penalty?

Correlation does not necessarily equal causation, of course. John Blume, director of the Death Penalty Project at Cornell University Law School, says declining support comes from a combination of factors, including recent high-profile exoneration cases and a growing awareness of its costs. But, he says, “historically there has been less support for capital punishment in times when rates of violent crime are lower.”

Earlier coverage of the lastest Gallup polling is at the link.  Related posts are in the public opinion polling category index.