Gallup Poll — Fewer than Half of Americans, a New Low, Believe Death Penalty is Applied Fairly

Fewer than half of Americans now believe the death penal­ty is fair­ly applied in the United States, accord­ing to the 2018 annu­al Gallup crime poll of U.S. adults, con­duct­ed October 1 – 10. The 49% of Americans who said they believed the death penal­ty was ​“applied fair­ly” was the low­est Gallup has ever record­ed since it first includ­ed the ques­tion in its crime poll in 2000. The per­cent­age of U.S. adults who said they believe the death penal­ty is unfair­ly applied rose to 45%, the high­est since Gallup began ask­ing the ques­tion, and the four-per­cent­age-point dif­fer­ence between the two respons­es was the small­est in the his­to­ry of Gallup’s polling.

The poll also found that, even as the num­ber of new death sen­tences are near his­toric lows, the per­cent­age of Americans say­ing that the death penal­ty is imposed too often con­tin­ued to rise and the per­cent­age say­ing it is not imposed enough con­tin­ued to decline. 57% of U.S. adults said the death penal­ty was imposed either ​“too often” (29%) or ​“about the right amount” (28%). In 2010, just 18% said the death penal­ty was imposed too often. While a plu­ral­i­ty of 37% said the death penal­ty was not imposed enough, that fig­ure was down 16% from the 53% lev­el who in 2005 said it was not imposed enough. Gallup ana­lyst Justin McCarthy wrote that ​“as exe­cu­tions in the U.S. have decreased along with the gen­er­al­ly sink­ing crime rate, Americans have become more like­ly to say cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is unfair­ly applied and that it is imposed too frequently.” 

Gallup mea­sured over­all sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment at 56%, which McCarthy described as ​“sim­i­lar to last year’s 55%.” 2017, he said, ​“marked the low­est lev­el of sup­port for the prac­tice since 1972.” He said ​“sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment … has been trend­ing down­ward since peak­ing at 80% in the mid-1990s dur­ing a high point in the vio­lent crime rate.” The poll mea­sured oppo­si­tion to the death penal­ty at 41%, the same as last year’s 45-year high. A nation­al Pew Reseach Center poll released in June 2018 report­ed sup­port for the death penal­ty at 54% and oppo­si­tion at 39%. A 2017 study report­ed that mur­ders in the 37 states that autho­rized the death penal­ty in 1994 declined by 35.4% between then and 2014, but that death sen­tences declined by 76.5% — more than dou­ble that rate — over the same time frame. 

(Justin McCarthy, New Low of 49% in U.S. Say Death Penalty Applied Fairly, Gallup News, October 22, 2018; Gallup, Americans’ Views on the Death Penalty, 2018 (Trends), October 2018.) See Public Opinion and Murder Rates.