THE MONITOR �
12/06/01
What
sways US views on death penalty
Americans
favor capital punishment by a 2-to-1 edge - down from a 5-to-1
margin in the 1990s, a time of high urban crime.
By
John Dillin
Staff
writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON
Americans
still favor the death penalty, but their support has waned during
the past few years.
Several
developments, including news reports of men found innocent who
were on death row in Illinois, have apparently shaken the
confidence of many Americans in the fairness of capital punishment.
Timothy
McVeigh's pending execution has added further fuel to the debate.
Mr. McVeigh, convicted of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah
Federal Building in Oklahoma City, would be the first person
executed under federal law in almost four decades.
While
Americans are often portrayed as ardent supporters of capital
punishment, the record shows that at times the public has been
sharply divided.
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The
most recent Christian Science Monitor/TIPP poll, completed May 3
to 7, found Americans favored capital punishment for persons
convicted of murder by more than a 2-to-1 margin. Yet that is down
significantly from the mid-1990s, when the margin was 5 to 1.
The
Monitor/TIPP poll found capital punishment is most firmly
championed by Republicans, men, and whites. Opposition is
strongest among Democrats, women, Hispanics, and blacks.
A
return to 1937?
Those
in favor of the death penalty led by 61 percent to 30 percent.
Those results were similar to a 1937 Gallup poll that reported
Americans favored the death penalty for murder convictions by 60
to 33 percent.
Yet
during the years since 1937, American opinion has swung widely.
"It has gone up and down over the years," says Edwin
Meese III, who served as attorney general under President Reagan.
Mr.
Meese, now a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation in
Washington, told the Monitor: "Particularly heinous crimes,
like the bombing in Oklahoma City, tend to increase support for
the death penalty. Then when you have news stories raising
questions about people's guilt, that has the opposite effect."
�A
world shift from execution
The
1960s, a time of antiwar sentiment and a rising counter-culture,
saw opposition to the capital punishment reach a high-water mark.
At one point - in 1966 during the Vietnam War - more Americans
were opposed to the death penalty (47 percent) than favored it (42
percent), the only time that has happened in the long-running
Gallup poll.
Then
in the 1990s, with violent urban crime making headlines, sentiment
swung sharply the other way. Gallup surveys found support for
executions reached an all-time peak of 80 percent in 1994. The
next year, opposition to capital punishment shrank to 13 percent,
the lowest ever.
Since
that time, surveys have shown gradual erosion of support for
executions.
Tonya
McClary, domestic program director for the National Coalition to
Abolish the Death Penalty, says DNA testing has been an eye-opener
for Americans, who realized innocent people are sometimes
convicted. Since1973, 95 persons have been freed from death row as
new information became available, according to the Death Penalty
Information Center in Washington.
Meese
and Ms. McClary say public opinion has also been influenced by the
recent investigative focus of the press on capital cases.
Newspapers have brought attention to the cases of not only
innocent people behind bars, but also the failure of states to
provide adequate counsel for people accused of capital crimes.
Public
debate over the death penalty is nothing new. On April 21, 1868,
John Stuart Mill, a famous 19th-century liberal, told the British
Parliament that the most humane yet effective punishment for
murderers was death.
"I
defend this penalty, when confined to atrocious cases, on the very
ground on which it is commonly attacked - on that of humanity to
the criminal," Mr. Mill argued. The only viable alternative,
life imprisonment and hard labor, would be "more cruel in
reality," he said.
Famed
Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw concurred in 1948: "The
real problem is the criminal you cannot reform." Imprisoning
such a person for life is no answer, for it unfairly wastes and
degrades the lives of the jailers, he said. A better answer is to
"kill him kindly and apologetically."
On
the other side, the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun
wrote in a 1994 dissent that for years, states had attempted to
impose the death penalty under court guidelines that required
fairness and consistency. Justice Blackmun said: "Despite the
effort of the States and courts to ... meet this daunting
challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness,
discrimination, caprice, and mistake."
Blackmun
concluded that eliminating the problems of the death penalty
"can never be achieved." For that reason, the system
will "wrongly kill some defendants." He said, "From
this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of
death."
The Monitor/TIPP survey found that 70 percent of those
favoring the death penalty do so because it is a "fitting
punishment" for a crime of murder. Most others who favored
the death penalty said its greatest value was as a deterrent to
crime.
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