Polls: Death Penalty Support Remains Near 50-Year Low Despite Record-High Perception that Crime Has Increased

Two nation­al polls have found that sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the United States remains near half-cen­tu­ry lows despite record-high per­cep­tion that local crime has increased. 

The 2022 Crime Survey by Gallup, admin­is­tered between October 3 – 20, 2022 against the back­drop of the Parkland school shoot­ing tri­al, report­ed sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment held steady at 55%, one per­cent­age point above the 50-year low of 54% in 2021. Gallup has mea­sured sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment at between 54%-56% for each of the past six years. 42% of respon­dents told Gallup they oppose the death penal­ty, one per­cent­age-point below 2021’s 50-year high.

Support for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, which his­tor­i­cal­ly had tracked Americans’ fear of crime, did not mate­ri­al­ly rise despite the largest increase in fifty years in the num­ber of U.S. adults who report that crime is up in the area in which they live. The spike in per­ceived crime was fueled pri­mar­i­ly by a surge in fear among those iden­ti­fy­ing as Republicans, whose per­cep­tion that local crime is ris­ing increased from 38% in the final year of the Trump pres­i­den­cy to 73% at the approach of Biden midterm elec­tions. Nationally, 56% of Americans told Gallup that local crime was up.

Gallup released the crime data October 28, 2022 and the death penal­ty data November 14, 2022.

A sec­ond nation­al poll, this one by Rasmussen Reports, found that few­er than half of American adults now sup­port the death penal­ty. The Rasmussen poll, con­duct­ed in a tele­phone and online sur­vey October 16 – 17, 2022 and released November 10, 2022, found that 46% of respon­dents who were asked ​“Do you favor or oppose the death penal­ty?” said they favor cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Twenty-eight per­cent of respon­dents told Rasmussen they oppose the death penal­ty and 26% said they weren’t sure.

The sur­vey — also admin­is­tered at the height of the American mid-term elec­tions dur­ing a bar­rage of adver­tis­ing that attempt­ed to stoke vot­ers’ fear of vio­lent crime — nev­er­the­less record­ed a con­tin­u­ing decline in expressed sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Those say­ing they favored the death penal­ty fell by 17 per­cent­age points from the 63% who favored cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in Rasmussen’s June 2011 nation­al sur­vey. Death penal­ty sup­port also fell by three per­cent­age points from July 2019, when 49% of respon­dents told Rasmussen they favored the death penalty.

Rasmussen also asked death penal­ty sup­port­ers two fol­low-up ques­tions relat­ed to the per­ceived length of time cap­i­tal cas­es remain in the legal sys­tem. Nearly two thirds of death penal­ty sup­port­ers (64%) said they ​“favor car­ry­ing out death sen­tences in a more time­ly fash­ion.” 29% of those favor­ing the death penal­ty agreed with the state­ment that a ​“death sen­tence should be delayed as long as nec­es­sary to allow all legal appeals to be exhaust­ed.” 7% said they weren’t sure.

A Death Penalty Information Center study of death-row exon­er­a­tions found that, on aver­age, it takes the court sys­tem more than a decade to free a for­mer death-row pris­on­er from a wrong­ful cap­i­tal con­vic­tion. Nearly one in five death-row exon­er­a­tions took two decades or more. The aver­age time between wrong­ful cap­i­tal con­vic­tion and exon­er­a­tion has increased each decade since the 1970s, reach­ing more than 20 years in the 2010s and sur­pass­ing 25 years for exon­er­a­tions so far in the 2020s.

Death penal­ty sup­port­ers were also asked if they believed their state car­ried out exe­cu­tions in a time­ly man­ner. 50% of death penal­ty sup­port­ers said no; 16% said yes; and 34% said they weren’t sure.