Update: American Public Opinion on the Death Penalty-It's Getting Personal
![handle is hein.journals/clqv83 and id is 1510 raw text is: UPDATE: AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION ON THE
DEATH PENALTY-IT'S GETTING PERSONAL
Samuel P. Grosst
Americans' views on capital punishment have stabilized. In 1994,
when Professor Phoebe Ellsworth and I published a review of research
on death penalty attitudes in the United States,' we began by noting
that support for the death penalty [is] at a near record high.'2 That
finding, like most of the others we reported, has not changed. None-
theless, it is interesting to pause and review the data on public opinion
on the death penalty that have accumulated over the past several
years. Stability is less dramatic than change but it may be equally im-
portant, and there is some news to report. Recent studies shed more
light on the reasons why Americans favor or oppose the death penalty,
reinforce earlier findings that their views may be less predictable in
concrete cases than they seem in the abstract, and hint at how these
attitudes might someday change.
I
GENERAL TRENDS
The General Social Survey (GSS), a yearly opinion poll con-
ducted by the National Opinion Research Center, is the best periodic,
general-purpose national poll available.3 On twenty-one occasions
from 1972 through 1996 it has included the question: Do you favor
or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?'4 From
t Thomas G. and Mabel A. Long Professor of Law, University of Michigan. I would
like to thank William Bowers, Theodore Eisenberg, Phoebe Ellsworth, Stephen Garvey,
Richard Nisbett, Norbert Schwartz, J. Frank Yates, and the participants at the March 1998
conference on How The Death Penalty Works, sponsored by the Cornell Law Review, for
helpful comments and suggestions, and Jennifer Matz for excellent research assistance.
This research was supported by funds from the Cook Endowment of the University of
Michigan Law School.
1 See Phoebe C. Ellsworth & Samuel R. Gross, Hardening of the Attitudes: Americans'
Views on the Death Penalty, J. Soc. IssuEs, Summer 1994, at 19. For simplicity, I sometimes
refer to authors Ellsworth and Gross in the first-person plural, as We.
2 Id. at 19.
3 Most of the polls cited in this Article can be found on a publicly available comput-
erized data base thanks to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University
of Connecticut. They are available in LEXIS, News Library, Rpoll File, as well as the
Westlaw and Dialog databases.
4 General Social Surveys, National Opinion Research Ctr., 1972-78, 1980, 1982-91,
199&-94, 1996, available in LEXIS, News Library, Rpoll File [hereinafter General Social
Surveys]. To be precise, in 1972 and 1973 the question was: Are you in favor of the death
penalty for persons convicted of murder?
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Update: American Public Opinion on the Death Penalty-It's Getting Personal
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