Less than half of U.S. adults favor the death penalty for convicted murderers, for the first time since 1971, according to a Gallup poll published on Nov. 10.
The poll, conducted from Oct. 1 to Oct. 19, found 49 percent of adults in favor of the death penalty for convicted murderers and 45 percent opposed. That matches the 1971 reading, and support hasn’t been lower since 1966, when it hit a record low of 42 percent.
The Gallup poll was conducted after convicted murderer Christa Pike survived a failed execution on Sept. 30, thrusting the issue of capital punishment into the spotlight nationwide.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced a pause on all executions for the rest of the year, pending an investigation.
Court documents filed by Pike’s lawyers on Oct. 2 stated that she could be heard “crying, whimpering, and breathing loudly throughout the procedure” at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
Pike, who survived two lethal doses of pentobarbital, said on Oct. 30 that she is constantly in pain and is still struggling to talk one month later.
“There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain. My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak,” Pike said in a statement emailed to The Epoch Times by her attorneys.
Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend killed their 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer after luring her from a Knoxville job-training program in 1995.
Prosecutors said Pike believed that Slemmer was trying to take her boyfriend, a claim that Slemmer’s friends denied.
The publicity over Pike’s failed execution may be a contributing factor to why the support figure in the Gallup poll declined from 52 percent last year.
Over the longer term, support has slid from a peak of 80 percent in 1994. Gallup first asked the question in 1936, when 59 percent were in favor. Most of the earlier dips below a majority came between 1965 and 1971, while legal challenges to state death penalty laws worked through the courts.
In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Furman v. Georgia that state death penalty laws, as then written, were unconstitutional.
The court held that imposing and carrying out the death penalty in the three cases before it “constitute cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.”
States rewrote their laws, and in 1976, the court upheld Georgia’s revised law in Gregg v. Georgia. Executions resumed in January 1977, when Gary Gilmore, the first person executed after the court’s pause, died by firing squad in Utah.
Gallup said support for the death penalty among Democrats had shown the largest decline—down by 47 points to 28 percent this year from 75 percent in 1994.
Support for the death penalty among Republicans has been more stable, at about 80 percent since the 1990s, falling to 73 percent. It peaked at 90 percent in 1988.
The death penalty is currently legal in 27 states.
Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he planned to commute the death sentences of all 548 inmates on death row in the state to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
“I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us,” Newsom said in an open letter to Californians on Nov. 5.
The term-limited governor, a Democrat, leaves office in January 2027, and last year, he said he would consider running for president in 2028.
