Poll: Support for Death Penalty in Louisiana Falls By 7 Percentage Points in 4 Years

Support for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in Louisiana has fall­en by sev­en per­cent­age points in the last four years, accord­ing to the 2022 Louisiana Survey by the Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs at Louisiana State University.

“Four years ago sup­port­ers of the death penal­ty out­num­bered oppo­nents by 24 points, today that dif­fer­ence is only 13 points,” Mike Henderson, Associate Professor at the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication and prin­ci­pal author of the report on the sur­vey, said.

51% of respon­dents to the annu­al sur­vey report­ed that they favor the death penal­ty, down from the 58% who expressed sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment the last time the Reilly Center asked the ques­tion in 2018. Opposition to the death penal­ty rose four per­cent­age points, from 34% to 38% in that same period.

Although sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment dropped among Louisianans of all polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions, the decline was most pro­nounced among those iden­ti­fy­ing as Independents. 61% of Independents in 2018 said that they favored the death penal­ty. That fell to 50% in the 2022 sur­vey, an 11 per­cent­age-point decline. 42% of Independents said they oppose the death penal­ty, up 11 per­cent­age points from the 31% who expressed oppo­si­tion in 2018. Eight per­cent of respon­dents in both year’s sur­veys were unde­cid­ed or declined to answer.

54% of Louisiana Democrats said that they opposed the death penal­ty, as com­pared to 32% of Democratic respon­dents who favored it. While death-penal­ty sup­port among Democrats fell by 11 per­cent­age points from 43% in 2018, oppo­si­tion rose by only one per­cent­age-point from 53%. 14% of Democratic respon­dents said they were unde­cid­ed on the issue or declined to answer, up from 4% in the 2018 survey.

Support for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment also declined by four per­cent­age points among Louisiana Republicans, falling from 74% in 2018 to 70% in the 2022 Louisiana Survey. Opposition to the death penal­ty increased mar­gin­al­ly, from 19% to 20%, with the per­cent­age of respon­dents unde­cid­ed or declin­ing to answer up by three per­cent­age points, from 7% to 10%.

The 2022 Louisiana Survey polled 508 adult respon­dents inter­viewed via land­line tele­phone, cell­phone, or online ques­tion­naire between February 21 and March 14, 2022. The Reilly Center report­ed that the poll has a mar­gin of error of ± 5.8 percentage points.

Louisiana’s thir­teen per­cent­age point dif­fer­ence between sup­port for and oppo­si­tion to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment was slight­ly high­er than the nation­al mar­gin of eleven per­cent­age points report­ed in the October 2021 Gallup poll, which report­ed 54% of respon­dents sup­port­ing the death penal­ty and 43% oppos­ing. The decline in sup­port for the death penal­ty among all polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions is con­sis­tent with the results of all major national polls.

Louisiana’s declin­ing sup­port for the death penal­ty is also con­sis­tent with trends in neigh­bor­ing states. Polling in Oklahoma in October 2021 found that sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment had declined by ten per­cent­age points since 2015. An April 2021 University of Texas/​Texas Tribune inter­net sur­vey found that sup­port for the death penal­ty had fall­en by 12 per­cent­age points in the state since February 2015.

“I sort of think peo­ple have seen those high pro­file cas­es [of pos­si­ble inno­cence] and have re-con­sid­ered whether [the death penal­ty is] the best sen­tenc­ing mea­sure to han­dle these kinds of crimes,” Henderson said. ​“Perhaps we are see­ing a small reflec­tion of that trend in this state and if it con­tin­ues, then the Legislature may recon­sid­er that view in their pol­i­cy a decade from now or per­haps soon­er,” he said.