Public support for the death penalty: Beyond gallup

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Abstract
Recent survey data indicate that as many as 80 percent of citizens support the death penalty for offenders convicted of homicide. These surveys, however, typically pose abstract questions about general support for capital punishment rather than providing respondents with real cases to evaluate. Thus the level of support revealed by these surveys may be an artifact of survey design, and may provide an inadequate view of citizens' willingness to impose capital punishment when confronted with actual cases. The research described here presented respondents with vignettes about and elicited judgments regarding the appropriate penalty for the murderers in the vignettes. The results suggest that in some cases, public support for capital punishment may be even stronger than indicated by surveys such as those conducted by Gallup. In other cases, levels of support seem to fall below what might be expected in light of the Gallup data.