People still favor death penalty, not sold on applying it to drug dealers

Charles Fain Lehman of the Washington Free Beacon highlights interesting polling data involving capital punishment.

Voters oppose abolishing the death penalty 64 to 31 percent, according to a recently released poll of American voters from Quinnipiac University.

A slightly smaller proportion, 58 percent, supported the death penalty “for persons convicted of murder,” while 33 percent are opposed it and nine percent are undecided. This proportion is slightly higher than that most recently reported by Gallup, which found 55 percent support for the death penalty for murder in its October 2017 poll. …

… Majorities of Republicans (84 percent) and independents (64 percent) oppose death penalty abolition; 46 percent of Democrats oppose, while 47 percent support, abolition. Opposition to abolition persists across ethnicities, with 66 percent of white Americans, 56 percent of black Americans, and 60 percent of Hispanic Americans opposing. Seventy-two percent of men oppose abolition, as opposed to 57 percent of women.

In preferences about capital punishment versus LWOP, Republicans are the only group by party affiliation to prefer the death penalty—59 percent, as compared to 19 percent of Democrats and 37 percent of independents. Forty percent of white Americans prefer the death penalty, as compared to 23 percent of black Americans and 34 percent of Hispanic Americans.

The results support the Supreme Court’s decision last week to not hear a case seeking to judicially abolish the death penalty nationwide. That case claimed capital punishment was contrary to “contemporary standards of decency,” therefore violating certain tests generally applied to the Eight Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

Notably, majorities of American voters oppose imposing the death penalty for those convicted of selling drugs that lead to a lethal overdose. Seventy-one percent oppose the practice, including 57 percent of Republicans; 75 percent of voters said that they believed the death penalty would not stop America’s opioid crisis.