New Polls Show Support for Death Penalty Declining in Utah and Oklahoma

New pub­lic opin­ion polls show that, con­sis­tent with nation­al trends, sup­port for the death penal­ty is declin­ing in the con­ser­v­a­tive strong­holds of Utah and Oklahoma.

A Deseret News/​Hinckley Institute of Politics poll released on October 27, 2021 report­ed that 51% of Utah vot­ers sur­veyed said they ​“oppose elim­i­nat­ing the death penal­ty” as a sen­tenc­ing option. By con­trast, in 2010, 79% of Utah vot­ers said that they favored the death penalty.

A pub­lic opin­ion poll by Cole Hargrave Snodgrass & Associates, con­duct­ed October 11 – 15 and released October 27, one day pri­or to the state’s October 28 botched exe­cu­tion of John Grant, report­ed that 64% of Oklahomans said they favored the death penal­ty. While sup­port for the death penal­ty remained strong, the results reflect­ed a con­tin­u­ing down­ward trend in the state. 68% of respon­dents in an October 2015 Cole Hargrave poll had said they sup­port­ed the death penal­ty and 74% of respon­dents to a June 2014 Tulsa World poll con­duct­ed by the Sooner Poll said they sup­port­ed capital punishment. 

Responses to polling ques­tions about the death penal­ty vary sig­nif­i­cant­ly depend­ing upon the word­ing of the ques­tions asked. At the same time Cole Hargrave report­ed in October 2015 that more than two-thirds of Oklahomans sup­port­ed the death penal­ty in the abstract, a November 2015 Sooner Poll found that 52.4% of Oklahomans would sup­port abol­ish­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment if the state replaced the death penal­ty with the alter­na­tive sanc­tion of life with­out parole, plus restitution.

The Utah poll was tak­en against the back­drop of a state leg­isla­tive attempt set for the 2022 leg­isla­tive ses­sion to repeal the Utah’s death penal­ty and replace it with a sen­tence of 45 years to life. Connor Boyack, President of the Utah-based lib­er­tar­i­an think-tank the Libertas Institute, called the decline in sup­port for the death penal­ty among Utahns ​“sig­nif­i­cant.” He told the Deseret News that, as phrased, the poll ques­tion under­states the like­ly sup­port for repeal­ing and replac­ing the state’s death penalty. 

“I feel like the ques­tion doesn’t accu­rate­ly rep­re­sent what’s being done in this leg­is­la­tion,” Boyack said. ​“Rep. (Lowry) Snow is not sim­ply doing away with the death penal­ty and leav­ing noth­ing in its place. His is an effort to replace it with some­thing that will allow for aggra­vat­ed mur­ders to have a harsher penalty ….”

Death-Penalty Support Declining Nationwide

Public opin­ion polling across the coun­try has doc­u­ment­ed a sig­nif­i­cant decline in sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. An analy­sis by University of North Carolina polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor Frank R. Baumgartner of more than a half-cen­tu­ry of pub­lic opin­ion polls on the death penal­ty showed that ​“Americans sup­port cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment less than they have at any time since the mod­ern death penal­ty sys­tem was estab­lished in 1976.” The 2020 annu­al Gallup poll on Americans’ atti­tudes about the cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, released in November 2020, found that 55% of respon­dents said they sup­port­ed the death penal­ty — the low­est lev­el of sup­port report­ed in a half-cen­tu­ry. In October 2019, in response to a dif­fer­ent­ly framed ques­tion, a record 60% of Americans favored life impris­on­ment over the death penal­ty.

The decline in death penal­ty sup­port in Oklahoma mir­rors the trend seen in Texas. While a sig­nif­i­cant major­i­ty of Texans sup­port the death penal­ty in the abstract, an April 2021 sur­vey con­duct­ed by the University of Texas/​Texas Tribune showed that sup­port for the death penal­ty fell from 75% in 2015 to 63% in 2021.

The Results from the New Polls

The Cole Hargrave Oklahoma poll report­ed that 64% of Oklahomans said they favor the death penal­ty with 23% say­ing they oppose it. The poll found sig­nif­i­cant par­ti­san dif­fer­ences, with 80% of Republicans say­ong they sup­port the death penal­ty while 9% said they oppose it. Among Oklahoma Democrats, 44% expressed sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, with 40% opposed. The poll also found sig­nif­i­cant gen­der and geo­graph­ic dif­fer­ences in opin­ion. 72% of male Oklahoma vot­ers said they favored the death penal­ty while 18% were opposed. By con­trast, 56% of women said they favored the death penal­ty while 28% were opposed. 71% of rur­al Oklahomans favored the death penal­ty, against 15% who opposed it. Voters in Oklahoma met­ro­pol­i­tan cen­ters favored cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment by a 57% to 31% margin.

The Utah poll, con­duct­ed between October 14 – 21, 2021 by the polling firm Dan Jones & Associates, told 746 Utah vot­ers ​“Utah law­mak­ers will con­sid­er a bill to do away with the death penal­ty as a sen­tenc­ing option in future cas­es” and asked them, ​“Do you sup­port or oppose elim­i­nat­ing the death penal­ty.” 40% of respon­dents said they sup­port­ed elim­i­nat­ing the death penal­ty, 51% said they don’t sup­port its elim­i­na­tion, and 8% said they don’t know. The poll data was released the same day the Utah County Commission — the leg­isla­tive body for one of the most con­ser­v­a­tive coun­ties in the state — vot­ed to sup­port the bill to repeal and replace Utah’s death penalty.

The Deseret News report­ed that the effort to repeal and replace the death penal­ty ​“is gain­ing steam” as death penal­ty sup­port con­tin­ues to decline. Boyack said, “[t]he decreas­ing pub­lic sup­port for the death penal­ty shows what we’ve seen with elect­ed offi­cials in recent years, and that is this: The more peo­ple learn about the death penal­ty, the less they sup­port it … I think the trend is indica­tive of the fact that truth is on our side.”