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Thread: United States Capital Punishment Public Opinion Polling

  1. #81
    Banned TheKindExecutioner's Avatar
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    Because of what happened in Boston and the constant threat of a jetliner being blown up killing HUNDREDS we will always have the death penalty. Since states rights is such a huge issue in America they can choose to have it too.

  2. #82
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    View of Death Penalty as Morally OK Unchanged in U.S.

    Lethal injection still widely viewed as most human method

    by Jeffrey M. Jones


    PRINCETON, NJ -- The recent news about the botched execution of an Oklahoma death row inmate has not affected the way Americans view the death penalty. Sixty-one percent say the death penalty is morally acceptable, similar to the 62% who said so in 2013, although both figures are down from a high of 71% in 2006.
    The results are based on Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs poll, conducted May 8-11. On April 29, an Oklahoma death row inmate given a lethal injection appeared to suffer for an extended period of time until finally dying of a heart attack. That incident led to the postponement of a second execution scheduled in Oklahoma that day and raised questions about the methods used to execute prisoners.
    The case did not fundamentally alter Americans' perceptions of the death penalty, however, with a solid majority viewing it as morally acceptable. This percentage is similar to the 60% who say they favor the death penalty as punishment for murder in Gallup's October update.
    But the longer-term trends reveal that Americans have become less supportive of the death penalty. Gallup first asked the moral acceptability question in 2001, with an average 66% saying it was acceptable between 2001 and the peak in 2006. Over the last three years, the percentage saying it is morally acceptable has averaged 60%.
    Similarly, Americans' support for the death penalty as a punishment for murder is also trending downward. Support reached a high of 80% in 1994, but it has generally slipped since then.

    Americans Still Say Lethal Injection Most Humane Form of Execution

    Lethal injection has been the most common method state officials have used to execute death row inmates for many years. The American public generally approves of that approach, as the poll finds Americans overwhelmingly saying lethal injection is the most humane way to administer the death penalty. The 65% holding this view compares with between 4% and 9% who endorse another method -- the electric chair, gas chamber, firing squad, or hanging -- as the most humane way to execute someone sentenced to death.
    Gallup has asked this question twice before, and although 23 years have elapsed since the question was last asked, the results today have changed little. In 1991, 67% said lethal injection was the most humane method for administering the death penalty, and in 1985, 56% said this.
    A majority of those who view the death penalty as morally acceptable and those who view it as morally wrong say lethal injection is the most humane way to execute prisoners. However, this belief is more common among those who say the death penalty is acceptable. Notably, roughly one in four of those who say the death penalty is morally wrong volunteer that "no method" is the most humane way to execute someone.

    Implications
    The drawn-out death of the Oklahoma prisoner reignited the debate over whether the death penalty violates the Constitution's prohibition of "cruel and unusual" punishment. The U.S. Supreme Court invalidated state death penalty statutes in the 1972 case Furman v. Georgia, deciding that death sentences were often arbitrary and consequently were a form of cruel and unusual punishment. Later, in the 1976 Gregg v. Georgia judgment, the Supreme Court ruled that states' rewritten statutes did pass constitutional muster, leading to a resumption of the death penalty in the U.S.
    Americans have long supported the death penalty, with majorities saying they favor it as a penalty for murder and believe it is morally acceptable. While both of these Gallup trends show diminished support for the death penalty in recent years, the trends were in place well before the Oklahoma case.

    http://www.gallup.com/poll/169085/vi...unchanged.aspx
    Last edited by Helen; 05-15-2014 at 09:59 PM.
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  3. #83
    Senior Member Member OperaGhost84's Avatar
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    Remember when they gave Romney a seven point lead? Man, that was way off. I still call 61% nothing short of a miracle since you can't get 61% of America to agree on the weather these days. Isn't it something that Obama and McCain, who don't really agree on much, both criticized the smack out of Kennedy vs Louisiana? If you try to execute someone for a murder during an armed robbery, there's chaos, pandemonium, and riots but I'll bet there won't be a peep for a child rapist. As a senior in high school, I was neck deep in both ROTC (where most were Republicans) and Theatre Club (where most were Democrats) and yet I was only able to find ONE person who was against the Death Penalty unequivocally. How's that for "National Consensus"?
    I am vehemently against Murder. That's why I support the Death Penalty.

  4. #84
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Americans Back Death Penalty by Gas or Electrocution If No Needle: Poll

    A badly botched lethal injection in Oklahoma has not chipped away at the American public's support of the death penalty, although two-thirds of voters would back alternatives to the needle, an exclusive NBC News poll shows.

    One in three people say that if lethal injections are no longer viable — because of drug shortages or other problems — executions should be stopped altogether, according to the survey of 800 adults by Hart Research and Public Opinion

    But many others are open to more primitive methods of putting prisoners to death: 20 percent for the gas chamber, 18 percent for the electric chair, 12 percent for firing squad and 8 percent for hanging.

    "The lethal injection is someone’s very gross interpretation of killing someone humanely," said Kuni Beasley of Frisco, Texas, who called for a return to hanging.

    "It's very quick. You don't have to worry about drugs and it's very efficient. Better than a firing squad — a firing squad is messy," said Beasley, 58, a retired Army officer and college-prep entrepreneur.

    "There is no such thing as killing someone humanely," he added. "But if hanging is done properly, it's more humane than lethal injection because there are fewer things that can go wrong."

    The most recent example of what can go wrong is the April 29 execution of Clayton Lockett, who appeared to regain consciousness and writhe in pain midway through. The procedure was halted but Lockett, convicted of rape and murder, died anyway.

    The details of his death were condemned by the White House and provoked fresh debate over capital punishment and how it's carried out.

    Most people polled said they knew about the uproar, but it did not appear to change minds about whether the government should kill murder convicts.

    A comfortable majority of those questioned — 59 percent — said they favor the death penalty as the ultimate punishment for murder, while 35 percent said they are opposed.

    For more survey results, click here


    That split is in line with surveys done before Lockett's death in the last two years, and also reflects the erosion of support for capital punishment since the 1990s, when it was more than 70 percent.

    "I don’t think this fundamentally altered views about the death penalty," said Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies.

    Republicans, whites, Protestants and older people were more likely to favor execution than Democrats, blacks and Latinos, Catholics and young people.

    More than a third of those in favor said the strongest argument for the death penalty is that it's an "appropriate consequence." A similar proportion of those against it said the risk of killing someone who had been wrongly convicted was the most powerful argument.

    "The most humane way is the guillotine but I can’t see that coming back."

    The population was split on whether execution or life in prison without parole is a worse punishment for murder.

    Keith Marcheski, 52, of Allentown, Pa., fell into the latter category and brought a very personal perspective to the question since he was released from prison in November after serving nine years for a robbery he says he did not commit.

    "I would rather be put to death than do my life in jail," said Marcheski, who does not believe the government should be killing prisoners.

    "I keep track of two of the guys I knew who are doing life. One would rather be put to death. You live in a cell. The food is horrible. He doesn't get mail. He doesn't get visits."

    Marsha Thompson, 25, a mechanic from Brooklyn, New York, agrees that life without parole is "more of a torture than being killed" but still thinks execution is appropriate in some cases.

    And to her mind, lethal injection is the best option. "It's less aggressive than being killed by a firing squad or electrocuted," she said.

    Gladys Pringle, an 82-year-old retiree from Port Royal, Pa., disagrees and thinks death-penalty states should swap out drug cocktails for bullets in light of reports that some condemned inmates have suffered on the gurney.

    "It would be quick and with a firing squad no one knows whose bullet actually killed the person, so it’s easier on them," she said.

    "The most humane way is the guillotine but I can’t see that coming back."

    All 35 capital punishment states use lethal injection as their primary method, although eight of them would allow electrocution, gas, hanging or firing squad in some cases, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

    But lethal injections are becoming increasingly difficult to carry out because pharmaceutical companies don't want their products used, some compounding pharmacies are getting out of the execution business, and inmates are trying to force states to reveal their suppliers.

    Some state lawmakers have introduced measures that would bring back the older methods, but some pro-execution advocates believe that would lower support from a public that has gotten used to "medicalized" deaths.

    "It makes people who would otherwise not favor the death penalty look more tolerably on it," said Beasley.

    After the Lockett debacle, he is more convinced than ever that hanging is the best option.

    After all, he said, "that's how they killed Saddam Hussein."

    http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/let...needle-n105346
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  5. #85
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    A Reply to the Atlantic on the Death Penalty

    By John R. Lott Jr.
    National Review

    Death-penalty opponents are engaging in a lot of hyperbole.

    As an example, in the Atlantic this past Thursday, Andrew Cohen went after what I have written on the death penalty at National Review Online and in my bookFreedomnomics, pushing the claim that “no reliable study by credible researchers has ever found any deterrent effect” from the death penalty. He also gets into the issue of race and quotes John H. Blume, a professor at Cornell Law School and death-penalty opponent, as asserting: “Every credible study has found a statistically significant race of victim effect” on who gets sentenced with the death penalty.

    As for the first claim, Cohen relies on a deceased economist who died before he could evaluate my claim and the April 2012 report from the National Research Council (NRC). But even that report, which was edited by two strong death-penalty opponents, contradicts the assertion that “no reliable study by credible researchers has ever found any deterrent effect.” Instead, the report concludes that there are approximately equal numbers of papers showing deterrence as showing no clear effect.

    Unfortunately, the NRC report itself is rather biased as it excludes more than half the academic research done. It counts only ten studies (nine were peer-reviewed) that look at all 50 states and what happens when states adopt the death penalty. By my count, 20 peer-reviewed studies and four non-peer-reviewed ones were of the type that the NRC considered — following the 50 states over time to see how murder rates change when states use the death penalty. Without offering any explanation, the NRC just ignored the bulk of the research that showed the death penalty deterred murders.

    Politicians, such as those in the Obama administration, simply can’t keep politics out of the National Research Council studies, and they bias reports through whom the government puts on these panels. The Obama administration knows the views of the people they put on the panels.

    If indeed they had surveyed all these peer-reviewed studies, they would have found that by more than 2-to-1, these studies found that the death penalty deters murders.

    Cohen phrases the debate this way: “On deterrence, he told me, we have Lott, who argues that ‘innocent people’s lives are saved thanks to the death penalty,’ and then we have an April 2012 report from the National Academy of Science’s

    National Research Council.” But that is a strange way of casting the debate. In truth, it isn’t me versus the NRC report. It is all the various academic papers and researchers the NRC report ignored.

    Of course, just because a study is peer-reviewed doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems with it. Not surprisingly, the NRC report couldn’t seem to find any problems with the studies that fail to find a deterrence effect from the death penalty.

    So why do some studies find an effect while others do not? As I explain over on my blog at the Crime Prevention Research Center website:

    The few studies that fail to find any deterrence from the death penalty have done some odd things. For instance, they measure the execution rate in strange ways. Take an approach first used by Lawrence Katz, Steven Levitt, and Ellen Shustorovich and later by John Donohue and Justin Wolfers. They do not look at the percent of murders that result in execution, but instead at the number of executions per prisoner.

    That simply makes no sense. If more criminals are put in prison for crimes such as petty larceny or auto theft, would that lower the risk that murderers face from execution? Of course not. Comparing two unrelated statistics, it is hardly surprising that this research cannot identify any benefit from the death penalty.

    Cohen would have known all this if he had simply looked at Chapter 4 of my book,Freedomnomics, before attacking me.

    So what about Cohen’s assertion that “every credible study has found a statistically significant race of victim effect” on who gets the death penalty? Notice that Cohen and the people he quotes never directly address my point that “the race results disappear as soon as you account for even simple variables such as income or occupation.”

    The final issue is whether the innocent are accidentally convicted. There is no DNA evidence proving that the wrong person has ever been executed. The rate that innocent people are even convicted of murder, let alone sentenced to death, is just a tiny fraction of one percent. Cohen’s hyperbole in defending law professor Sam Gross’s claim that 4 percent of death-row inmates are wrongly convicted confuses convictions that are overturned with convictions that were mistakes on the merits. The paper effortlessly slides from using terms like “false convictions” to “exoneration” (e.g., top left column of page 2), but while the rate of overturned cases for any reason is indeed higher in death-penalty cases simply because so much effort is put into appeals, neither of these terms implies the defendant was innocent.

    Assertions about “credibility” and appeals to authority won’t magically make the bulk of the academic research go away.

    http://www.nationalreview.com/corner...john-r-lott-jr
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  6. #86
    Banned TheKindExecutioner's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by OperaGhost84 View Post
    Remember when they gave Romney a seven point lead? Man, that was way off. I still call 61% nothing short of a miracle since you can't get 61% of America to agree on the weather these days. Isn't it something that Obama and McCain, who don't really agree on much, both criticized the smack out of Kennedy vs Louisiana? If you try to execute someone for a murder during an armed robbery, there's chaos, pandemonium, and riots but I'll bet there won't be a peep for a child rapist. As a senior in high school, I was neck deep in both ROTC (where most were Republicans) and Theatre Club (where most were Democrats) and yet I was only able to find ONE person who was against the Death Penalty unequivocally. How's that for "National Consensus"?
    Are you speaking of one of Karl Rove's fake polls? All legit pollsters had Obama tied or ahead of Romney toward the end. I followed the election closely and I can't think of a single legit poll that had Romney 7 points ahead.

  7. #87
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    That poll is crap, you can't tell me that support is less than 50% in the US for the DP, when here in Canada 62% support it and we don't even have the DP....absolute, utter, nonsense.
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  8. #88
    Senior Member Frequent Poster schmutz's Avatar
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    One can both support having a death penalty and prefer LWOP.

  9. #89
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    One problem with these polls is with the question they ask. It's usually something like "Are you in favor of the death penalty as punishment for murder?" The question doesn't reflect the fact that the death penalty in the USA is exclusively reserved for capital murder. The real questions asked should be, for example, "Are you in favor of the death penalty for men who rape babies to death?" or "Are you in favor of the death penalty for serial killers?" or "Are you in favor of the death penalty for people who blow up buildings killing dozens of people?" and so on.

    If the questions were asked about specific capital murder scenarios or actual cases, support would be much higher for the death penalty, which makes sense since the death penalty is usually supposed to be for the worst of the worst and not "run-of-the-mill" murders.

  10. #90
    Banned TheKindExecutioner's Avatar
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    Good point Moh.

    I still say since we live in the age of terrorism after 9/11 we will always have the DP even if it is used less often. There is always a constant threat of a jetliner or building being blown up by a terrorist like McVeigh. In such cases most Americans won't be satisfied with putting them in nice jail cell with 3 hot meals a day.

    They would want true justice for HUNDREDS killed!

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