According to Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., a Harvard law professor who taught President Obama and the First Lady when they were law students, the President may be changing his views on capital punishment. Obama has said that he supports executions for “especially horrific” murders, but has also raised concerns about the death penalty. Ogletree said that Obama’s recent focus on racial bias in the criminal justice system, as well as declining public support for the death penalty, may drive the President to oppose capital punishment. “He’s not there yet, but he’s close,” Ogletree said. “Even if he doesn’t change his mind in the next year and a half, I think the public’s point of view is going to influence him.” A former strategist for President George W. Bush, Matthew Dowd, recently compared changing public views on the death penalty and same-sex marriage, saying, “Twenty years from now, people that are for the death penalty are going to be in the same place as people that are against gay marriage.” In 2014, Obama commented on the death penalty after the botched execution of Clayton Lockett. “In the application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems — racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty,” he said. A growing body of research supports Obama’s statement about racial bias. For example, a study in Philadelphia found that the odds of a jury handing down a death sentence were 29 times higher if the defendant was black, and that murder cases involving a black defendant and a white victim resulted in death sentences at 5 times the rate of cases in which the races were reversed.

(M. Ehrenfreund, “Why Obama is ‘close’ to opposing the death penalty, according to a long-time associate,” The Washington Post, July 16, 2015.) See Race and Public Opinion.

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