Gallup Poll: Record-Low Percentage of Americans Now Find Death Penalty Morally Acceptable

The per­cent­age of Americans who con­sid­er the death penal­ty to be moral­ly accept­able has fall­en to a record-low, a new nation­al poll by the Gallup orga­ni­za­tion has found.

According to the 2020 Gallup Values and Beliefs poll, released on June 23, 2020, 54% of U.S. adults now say the death penal­ty is moral­ly accept­able. (Click here to see his­to­ry of poll results.) That num­ber rep­re­sents a six-per­cent­age-point decline over the course of the last year and is the low­est in the 20-year his­to­ry of the poll. The results are 17 per­cent­age points below the 71% of respon­dents who said in 2006 that the death penal­ty was morally acceptable.

Conversely, the per­cent­age of Americans who said the death penal­ty is moral­ly wrong reached a record high at 40%.

Gallup also mea­sured the moral accept­abil­i­ty of the death penal­ty by polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy. The per­cent­ages of self-report­ed mod­er­ates and lib­er­als who said the death penal­ty was moral­ly accept­able — 56% and 37%, respec­tive­ly — both were the low­est record­ed since the poll began in 2001. 67% of con­ser­v­a­tives said they con­sid­er the death penal­ty to be moral­ly accept­able. Belief in the accept­abil­i­ty of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment was down sig­nif­i­cant­ly among all ide­o­log­i­cal groups since 2006, when endorse­ment of the moral accept­abil­i­ty of the death penal­ty was at its zenith. Since then, the num­ber of con­ser­v­a­tives and mod­er­ates who find the death penal­ty moral­ly accept­able has declined by 12 per­cent­age points, each. The num­ber of lib­er­als endors­ing the moral accept­abil­i­ty of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment has fall­en by 22 per­cent­age points dur­ing that period.

Gallup Research Consultant Megan Brenan said that the results of the organization’s 2020 Values and Beliefs poll are ​“in line with [Gallup] polling last fall that showed decreased pub­lic sup­port for the death penal­ty and a record-high pref­er­ence for life impris­on­ment over the death penal­ty as a bet­ter pun­ish­ment for murder.” 

The organization’s October 2019 nation­al death penal­ty poll report­ed that 56% of U.S. adults favored cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, the sec­ond low­est lev­el of sup­port for the death penal­ty in 47 years. Sixty per­cent of U.S. adults who were asked to choose whether the death penal­ty or life with­out pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole ​“is the bet­ter penal­ty for mur­der” chose the life-sen­tenc­ing option. It was the first time since Gallup began ask­ing the ques­tion in 1985 that a major­i­ty of respon­dents said they preferred life.