On July 1, the Biden administration halted the use of the federal death penalty, reversing the Trump administration’s 2020 resumption of executions. The announcement of a moratorium pending a review of “policies and procedures” is less permanent than legislative abolition, but it is unlikely the president could get Congress to end the death penalty. Many Americans support capital punishment; in fact, our research shows that public support for the death penalty is even greater than commonly reported.
Public opinion changes more on some controversial issues than on others. For example, as measured by the Gallup organization, opposition to same-sex marriage declined from nearly 70% in the late 1990s to just about 30% today. In contrast, the percentages of Americans identifying as “pro-choice” and “pro-life” have hardly changed in the last twenty years, with Americans nearly evenly divided. The standard ways of asking about the death penalty have made it look more like same-sex marriage, with large changes in public opinion over the past two-to-three decades, than it looks like abortion. Many have expected that the United States is nearing a tipping point at which opposition to the death penalty will overtake support for it.
The Pew Research Center recently reported that 60% of Americans support the death penalty for murder. Gallup, which has been asking Americans about capital punishment since the late 1930s, gauges current support at 55%. These are clear majorities but well below the modern peak of around 80% in the mid-1990s. Political choices have begun to reflect this systematic decline in support. Despite championing the death penalty in the 1990s, President Biden joined nearly every other Democratic presidential candidate in calling for its abolition in his 2020 campaign. Virginia (in 2021) and Colorado (in 2020), both states trending towards the Democratic Party, recently abolished the death penalty.
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