DEAD RECKONING ON U.S. EXECUTIONS

Newspapers have perpetuated a myth of 'overwhelming' support for capital punishment, with deadly results

If I've read it once, I've read it a hundred times: Americans "overwhelmingly" support the death penalty. A recent article in The New York Times began, "Americans want capital punishment, and they want it now." But is this really what the public wants? If so, is the support as bullish as journalists believe? Or is this a tragic American myth, perpetuated by the press, with deadly consequences? Contrary to what you read -- or write -- in the newspaper, conflict
and ambivalence surround capital punishment in America.
Even as the execution rate soars, opposition to state killing -- on moral, practical, and legal grounds -- has intensified. One Death Row controversy after another has emerged, ranging from who we kill (a woman, in Texas) to how we kill (the electric chair, in Florida), and the steady release of prisoners from Death Row, based on DNA test results, now threatens the very institution of capital punishment.
Polls, in fact, are now drifting in the anti-death-penalty direction. A recent Gallup Poll found backing for capital punishment at its lowest level in nearly a decade, down from 80% to 64%.
Now, you may argue that this still suggests pretty powerful support. But look more closely.
In recent years, more than two-thirds of the states have enacted procedures for sentencing murderers to life without parole, with no chance that a convict will ever get out. At the same time, pollsters began listing life without parole as an alternative to executions, with interesting results. In many surveys, support for executions as the preferred choice for punishing those convicted of first-degree murder suddenly dropped below 50%. An ABC News poll this year, for example, showed support for the death penalty falling off to 48% when life without parole was proposed as an option.
Polls in New Jersey, Missouri, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, California, and other states show much the same thing. A March 2000 poll by the Chicago Tribune found virtually an even split in Illinois: 43% backing executions, 41% life without parole.
That ABC poll, further damaging the myth of "overwhelming support" for capital punishment, found several large segments of society expressing strong preference for life without parole over executions, with Democrats choosing "life" over death by 53% to 37%, women by 50% to 39%, and blacks by a lopsided 67% to 26%. Hardly a ringing endorsement of executions.
What's striking about these findings is that many Americans still have little confidence in life without parole. The trend to life without parole is only a few years old, few know about it, and it will take many more years before most of the public believe that it really means what it says.
Why do a growing number of citizens (and capital jurors) seem to favor an alternative to executions? A Gallup Poll in June showed that 41% believe the death penalty is applied unfairly in this country -- and 80% said they believed an innocent person had been executed in the past five years.
Oddly, while most newspapers have almost totally overlooked these views, they have in other ways done much to contribute to the rise in anti-death-penalty sentiment in the country. It was a Chicago Tribune series on wrongful convictions, for instance, that helped spark the current Illinois moratorium on executions. And many leading newspapers have editorialized for moratoria -- or outright abolition -- in their states, including The Sun in Baltimore, the San Francisco Examiner, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor.
A Newsweek poll in June showed that more than one-third of the sample voiced support for a moratorium on executions, like the one instituted in Illinois. Still, reporters routinely refer to "overwhelming" support for capital punishment.
How the press depicts national sentiment is crucial in this case (as Robert Jay Lifton and I show in our new book, "Who Owns Death?"), for public opinion drives the death penalty in America more than it does virtually any other issue. Legislators and candidates for office usually embrace the idea of executions, convinced it would be political suicide to act otherwise. In recent decades, even U.S. Supreme Court justices have cited poll results in ruling that capital punishment does not represent cruel and unusual punishment.
Communicating what the public actually believes about the death penalty is obviously crucial, for any perceived dwindling of public support endangers the entire process. More politicians will begin speaking out against executions if they see it no longer means political death to do so.
Only then will America join the rest of the modern Western world in abandoning capital punishment, that "barbaric vestige of an archaic culture, " as Russell Baker aptly observed.

(Editor & Publisher Web Site: http://www.editorandpublisher.com)
(copyright: Editor & Publisher November 6, 2000)