23 October 2018 :

Gallup Poll measured overall support for capital punishment at 56%, similar to last year's 55%. The poll measured opposition to the death penalty at 41%, the same as last year's 45-year high. 4% answered “no opinion”. Fewer than half of Americans, a new low, believe death penalty is applied fairly. Fewer than half of Americans now believe the death penalty is fairly applied in the United States, according to the 2018 annual Gallup crime poll of U.S. adults, conducted October 1-10. The 49% of Americans who said they believed the death penalty was "applied fairly" was the lowest Gallup has ever recorded since it first included the question in its crime poll in 2000. The percentage of U.S. adults who said they believe the death penalty is unfairly applied rose to 45%, the highest since Gallup began asking the question, and the four-percentage-point difference between the two responses was the smallest in the history of Gallup's polling. The poll also found that, even as the number of new death sentences are near historic lows, the percentage of Americans saying that the death penalty is imposed too often continued to rise and the percentage saying it is not imposed enough continued to decline. 57% of U.S. adults said the death penalty was imposed either "too often" (29%) or "about the right amount" (28%). In 2010, just 18% said the death penalty was imposed too often. While a plurality of 37% said the death penalty was not imposed enough, that figure was down 16% from the 53% level who in 2005 said it was not imposed enough. Gallup analyst Justin McCarthy wrote that "as executions in the U.S. have decreased along with the generally sinking crime rate, Americans have become more likely to say capital punishment is unfairly applied and that it is imposed too frequently." McCarthy said "support for capital punishment ... has been trending downward since peaking at 80% in the mid-1990s during a high point in the violent crime rate." A national Pew Reseach Center poll released in June 2018 (see HoC 11/06/2018) reported support for the death penalty at 54% and opposition at 39%. Results are based on telephone interviews conducted October 1-10, 2018 with a random sample of 1,019 adults. The margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points.