A sharp drop in violent crime, greater media attention given to wrongful convictions, and reports of inhumane and prolonged executions are some of the reasons for a shift in public opinion away for supporting the death penalty since the mid-1990s, Pew reports.
Across the nation's religious groups, support and opposition varies dramatically.
- 67 percent of white evangelical Protestants favor the death penalty.
- 64 percent of white mainline Protestants do.
- 58 percent of black Protestants oppose the death penalty, making them the group most strongly opposed to it (33 percent support it).
- 54 percent of Hispanic Catholics oppose it, while 37 percent support it.
Not surprisingly, there's a political divide, too: 71 percent of Republicans support the death penalty, while only 47 percent of Democrats do.
Evidence suggests that the death penalty continues to be plagued by racial disparities, which may explain differences in support among the country's racial groups. Since 1977, defendants are more likely to be sentenced to death in the U.S. if the murder victim is white, and African-Americans are treated more harshly as defendants, according to Amnesty International. A 2007 study from Yale University School of Life also found that African-American defendants receive the death penalty at three times the rate of white defendants in the cases where victims are white.
But several recent cases concerning secrecy around lethal injection drugs point to greater consideration for death row prisoners. In Texas, a judge ordered state prison officials to disclose where they bought their last batch of lethal injection drugs from, NBC News reports. A similar case was ruled in Louisiana, and in Oklahoma, a judge said that secrecy about the drugs is unconstitutional.
Comment: It is unsurprising that political and religious conservatives would uphold capital punishment as these groups are largely populated by authoritarian followers. According to psychologist Robert Altmeyer, authoritarian personalities are characterized by hierarchical submission to traditional authorities, aggression and conventionalism. He found that authoritarians strongly favor capital punishment and that they tend to have a retributive streak that delights in the comeuppance of others as they see fit. Altmeyer has done extensive empirical research on the subject, which is summarized in his book, 'The Authoritarians'.