New Report Documents ​“Dramatic Rise” in Republican Support for Death-Penalty Repeal

“The death penalty is dying in the United States, and Republicans are contributing to its demise,” concludes a new report, The Right Way, released on October 25 by the advocacy group Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty.

The report traces “the dramatic rise in Republican sponsorship of bills to end the death penalty” and the trends that it says helped contribute to this rise. Based on this data, the report says “[m]ore Republican lawmakers are recognizing that the death penalty is a broken policy and taking an active role in efforts to end it.”

The data in the report reflect both the emergence of Republican leadership in bills to repeal the death penalty and increased bi-partisanship in the sponsorship of these bills. Forty Republican legislators sponsored bills to abolish the death penalty in 2016, the report says, “ten times as many [who] sponsored repeal bills … in 2000.” It also reports that the percentage of repeal-bill sponsors who are Republicans has risen to 31%, a six-fold increase since 2007.

The report highlights grassroots, party-level, and religious shifts in Republican views about and activism against the death penalty. In addition to the national Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, conservative anti-death-penalty advocacy groups have formed in eleven predominently Republican “red states.”

In Kansas, the state Republican Party “removed its death penalty support from the Party’s platform in 2014” in favor of a neutral position and voted down an attempt to restore a pro-death penalty stance in 2016. The report also says Evangelicals are increasingly “forsak[ing] the death penalty,” pointing to the public involvement of prominent Evangelical leaders opposing state efforts to carry out executions in a number of recent cases and the new policy of position the National Association of Evangelicals, expressing neutrality on the death penalty and acknowledging its flaws.

Recent national polls confirm the report’s observations. The October 2017 Gallup poll on the death penalty indicated that death-penalty support among Republicans fell by ten percentage points, from 82% to 72%, in the last year, and the Pew Research Center reported a seven percentage-point decline in support for capital punishment between 2011 and 2015 among respondents who described themselves as conservative Republicans.

The Right Way highlights the actions of five Republican state legislators’ efforts to repeal capital punishment in predominantly Republican states, and addresses the substantive concerns that have given rise to Republican death-penalty opposition. “Plagued by wrongful convictions, high costs, and delays,” the report says, “the death penalty has proven to be ineffective and incompatible with a number of core conservative principles. It runs afoul of conservative commitments to limited government, fiscal responsibility, and a culture of life.”

As renewed pushes to abolish the death penalty move forward in states like Utah and New Hampshire, the Gallup organization suggests that the actions of Republicans may be critical in determining the death penalty’s future. It’s analysis of this year’s poll states: “Thirty-one states, primarily in Republican-leaning regions, allow the death penalty. The likelihood of many of those states changing their laws hinges on whether rank-and-file Republican support for capital punishment remains high or declines in the future.”