Poll Finds Record-Low Support for Death Penalty Among Houstonians

Just 20% of Houstonians — a record low — now sup­port the death penal­ty over life-sen­tenc­ing alter­na­tives, a new Rice University sur­vey has found. The 2020 Houston Area Survey by the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, released on May 4, 2020, found that death-penal­ty sup­port has declined by more than half since the turn of the 21^st cen­tu­ry in the city of 2.3 million residents. 

The sur­vey results are note­wor­thy because Houston com­pris­es 50% of the pop­u­la­tion of Harris County, Texas, a coun­ty that has account­ed for more than twice as many exe­cu­tions in the past half cen­tu­ry as any oth­er coun­ty in the United States. 

The 2020 sur­vey was con­duct­ed dur­ing February and ear­ly March of 2020, ​“before there were clear signs of an impend­ing [coro­n­avirus] cri­sis,” the Institute said. The researchers asked Houston res­i­dents to choose which among three sen­tenc­ing alter­na­tives they believed was most appro­pri­ate for per­sons con­vict­ed of first-degree mur­der: ​“the death penal­ty, life impris­on­ment with no chance for parole, or life impris­on­ment with a chance for parole after 25 years.” They report­ed that ​“the per­cent­age choos­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment dropped from 41 per­cent in 2000, to 37 per­cent in 2010, to 27 per­cent in 2016, and to 20 per­cent in this year’s sur­vey.” (To enlarge graph­ic, click here.) In 1993, 75% of Houstonians said they were in favor of the death penal­ty. In the 2019 Kinder sur­vey, those who said they were in favor of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment had declined to 56%. 

The sur­vey linked respon­dents’ death-penal­ty atti­tudes to broad­er shifts in opin­ions on crime and pun­ish­ment. Just 11% of res­i­dents named crime as the biggest prob­lem fac­ing Houston — the low­est num­ber in the 39 years of the sur­vey. The per­cent­age who said they were very wor­ried about being a vic­tim of crime also hit a record low, at 17%. Houstonians’ sup­port for harsh pun­ish­ments for low-lev­el drug crimes also declined. Most respon­dents (70%) said pos­ses­sion of small amounts of mar­i­jua­na should not be a crim­i­nal offense, a major shift since the ques­tion was last asked in 2003, when a 56% major­i­ty said mar­i­jua­na pos­ses­sion should be crim­i­nal­ized. ​“The decline in puni­tive­ness is con­sis­tent with the oth­er evi­dence show­ing the growth in empa­thy and in the accep­tance of dif­fer­ences that seems to be devel­op­ing among Houston area res­i­dents,” the report’s authors wrote. 

A DPIC analy­sis of coun­ty-lev­el sen­tenc­ing and exe­cu­tion data shows that the dra­mat­ic decline in pub­lic sup­port for the death penal­ty in Houston has been reflect­ed in an equal­ly dra­mat­ic decline in death-penal­ty usage coun­ty-wide. Sixty-six cap­i­tal defen­dants were sen­tenced to death in Harris County from 1995 – 1999. There have been only two new death sen­tences in the coun­ty since 2015. Though Harris County has pro­duced more exe­cu­tions than any oth­er coun­ty in the United States, with 129, that num­ber also has fall­en sharply in recent years. The DPIC analy­sis found that 24 Harris County pris­on­ers were exe­cut­ed in the sec­ond half of the 1990s, as com­pared to 7 in the sec­ond half of the 2010s. 

In 2016, the coun­ty elect­ed a new District Attorney, Kim Ogg, who pledged ​“very few death penal­ty pros­e­cu­tions” and said in 2017, ​“I don’t think that being the death penal­ty cap­i­tal of America is a sell­ing point for Harris County.” 2017 marked the first time in more than 30 years that Harris County imposed no new death sen­tences and no one sen­tenced to death in the coun­ty was executed.