Study Finds Three-Fourths of Americans Believe an Innocent Person Has Been Executed in Last Five Years, Weakening Support For the Death Penalty, Especially Among African-Americans

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For release: 9 a.m., Thursday, Feb. 10, 2005

Has Been Executed in Last Five Years, Weakening Support

For the Death Penalty, Especially Among African-Americans

Three-quarters of Americans believe that an innocent person has been executed within the last five years for a crime he or she did not commit, according to a study in the February issue of Criminology & Public Policy.

 The study further notes that this belief is associated with lower levels of support for capital punishment, especially among African Americans.

Criminology & Public Policy is an academic journal published by the American Society of Criminology and edited by Professor Todd Clear of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. The study was conducted by James D. Unnever, of Radford University, and Francis T. Cullen, of the University of Cincinnati.

Support for the death penalty was significantly lower among both blacks and whites who believe capital punishment is applied unfairly.

Only 68.6% of respondents supported the death penalty among those who believed an innocent person was executed, versus support of 86.9% of the respondents who did not believe any innocent people were executed. When life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is offered as an alternative, less than half of all Americans who believed an innocent person was executed supported the death penalty.

The study analyzed data collected by the Gallup Organization, and although the authors caution that they cannot establish beyond doubt that the cause of lower support was the belief that an innocent person was executed, their analysis shows that doubts about the guilt of those convicted of capital crimes are a main consideration in overall support for the death penalty.

A major policy implication of their findings, the authors state, is that anti-death penalty advocates may significantly lower the support for the death penalty through informational campaigns that show innocent people have been executed.

In an accompanying “reaction essay” in the journal, however, Steven F. Barkan and Steven F. Cohen, of the University of Maine, cast doubt on whether such a campaign would be effective because “white support for the death penalty has a strong basis in racial prejudice” and “white support is thus relatively intractable to intentional efforts by informational campaigns to change it.”

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Attention reporters and editors: You may obtain a PDF of the entire study and reaction essays by e-mailing dmahar@rubenstein.com with the message “Please send PDF’s of death penalty study.” You will receive the PDF’s promptly.