As Biden Administration Mulls Federal Death-Penalty Policy, Study Finds U.S. Support for Capital Punishment at Lowest Point Since 1960s

As President Biden con­sid­ers his administration’s pol­i­cy on the fed­er­al death penal­ty, his expressed oppo­si­tion to the pun­ish­ment may be buoyed by a new study that has found that ​“Americans sup­port cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment less than they have at any time since the mod­ern death penal­ty sys­tem was estab­lished in 1976.”

The polling analy­sis, con­duct­ed by University of North Carolina polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor Frank R. Baumgartner and pub­lished August 3, 2021 in the Washington Post​’s data fea­ture ​“Monkey Cage,” reviewed 595 pub­lic opin­ion sur­veys admin­is­tered between 1936 and May 2021 that asked respon­dents across the coun­try about their atti­tudes towards cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. To be includ­ed in Baumgartner’s analy­sis, a poll had to be admin­is­tered on mul­ti­ple occa­sions using iden­ti­cal­ly word­ed sur­vey ques­tions. Then, using a math­e­mat­i­cal tech­nique called dyad ratios mod­el, Baumgartner plot­ted the lev­el of sup­port for the death penal­ty over time (click here to enlarge graph­ic). Data from those polls, he said, show that sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment ​“has declined … to its low­est point since 1966.” 

During the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, can­di­date Joe Biden’s web­site post­ed a pledge to ​“work to pass leg­is­la­tion to elim­i­nate the death penal­ty at the fed­er­al lev­el, and incen­tivize states to fol­low the fed­er­al government’s exam­ple.” In his guest col­umn in the Post, Baumgartner explained the poten­tial sig­nif­i­cance of his find­ings to the administration’s decision making. 

“If Biden want­ed,” Baumgartner observed, ​“he could halt the fed­er­al death penal­ty for a gen­er­a­tion with the stroke of a pen by com­mut­ing the sen­tences of the 46 peo­ple now on fed­er­al death row.” Noting the public’s his­tor­i­cal­ly low enthu­si­asm for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, he writes, “[i]f the pres­i­dent and his advis­ers think this would be unpop­u­lar, they are wrong. … As the Biden admin­is­tra­tion con­sid­ers its next steps, offi­cials will prob­a­bly pay atten­tion to pub­lic opin­ion, which now oppos­es the death penal­ty more than at any time in the pre­vi­ous 50 years.”

The Index of Public Support for the Death Penalty

Baumgartner’s analy­sis builds on a sta­tis­ti­cal index of pub­lic sup­port for capital punishment he cre­at­ed in December 2015 based upon the results of 488 nation­al sur­veys on the death penal­ty over the pre­ced­ing 40 years. At that time, he found that “[t]he num­ber of death sen­tences tracks close­ly with pub­lic opin­ion toward that form of pun­ish­ment” and that the trends in increas­es or decreas­es in death sen­tences imposed close­ly tracked the changes in the index of pub­lic sup­port for capital punishment. 

Baumgartner set the base­line for his cur­rent index of sup­port at the aver­age of U.S. atti­tudes toward the death penal­ty from 1953 to 2021. In 1953, he says, sup­port was ​“just above aver­age,” falling over the next 13 years to 9.7 points below aver­age in 1966, the low point in this peri­od. Support for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment then ​“trend[ed] uneven­ly but steadi­ly upward to its high in 1997, with sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment near­ly 20 points high­er than in 1966,” at 10.3 points above aver­age. However, Baumgartner writes, ​“pub­lic opin­ion toward the death penal­ty has soured even more quick­ly in the past two decades than it grew in the decades before,” declin­ing to 9.2 points below aver­age, its low­est lev­el since 1966.

During the course of his analy­sis of the sur­vey results, Baumgartner found that “[m]any of the polls word­ed the ques­tions dif­fer­ent­ly — and,” he says, ​“as in all polling, ques­tion word­ing mat­ters a lot.” Two of the most fre­quent­ly asked ques­tions illus­trate the impact, he says. First is the lan­guage of the Gallup poll ques­tion, asked 57 times dur­ing the time peri­od Baumgartner stud­ied: ​“Do you favor or oppose the death penal­ty for per­sons con­vict­ed of mur­der?” A sec­ond com­mon way of mea­sur­ing death-penal­ty sup­port is: ​“What do you think should be the penal­ty for mur­der: The death penal­ty, or life impris­on­ment with absolute­ly no pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole?” 

When giv­en the choice of a sen­tenc­ing alter­na­tive, Baumgartner found that sup­port for the death penal­ty reg­is­tered 12 per­cent­age points low­er. The dif­fer­ences make assess­ing the true lev­el of sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment more dif­fi­cult, he says. But because the same ques­tions are repeat­ed over the course of many years, one can accu­rate­ly assess trends and mea­sure the rel­a­tive lev­el of sup­port for the death penal­ty. By that mea­sure, it is at its low­est point in more than a half-century.