Public Defense

Latest poll: CT still split on death penalty vs. LWPOR

By Gideon

As lawyers know, it’s all about how you ask the question. If you ask “Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”, you get one answer and if you ask “Which punishment do you prefer for people convicted of murder, the death penalty or life in prison with no chance of parole?” you get quite another.

The latest Quinnipiac University poll released today, asks both of those questions of a sample of 1700+ voters in Connecticut, with a margin of error of 2.4%, and the results lead to headlines like this one and this one. The question, of course, starts with a faulty premise. Not all murders are death penalty eligible. A vast majority of murders aren’t death penalty eligible. But that’s just a quibble.

Let’s look at the numbers:

65% favor the “death penalty for all murders”, while 23% oppose it.

Now, my memory isn’t great, but something about that doesn’t seem very odd at all. In fact, it seems starkly reminiscent of the last poll, conducted in 2007, right after the Cheshire home invasion murders:

In 2007, 63% were in favor of the death penalty, with 27% opposed.

A 2% increase in support for the death penalty, and this after the penalty phase trial of Steven Hayes where every gory and heartbreaking detail you can imagine was splashed across the front page of every newspaper and every computer screen in the entire State. 2%, which might as well be within the damn margin of error. So essentially, there is little to no change in the support for the death penalty from 3 years ago.

So the headlines today are somewhat accurate and somewhat misleading. If the options were death penalty or nothing, then I’d probably choose the death penalty too. So what happens when people are given a viable second alternative?

If the two choices were the death penalty or life without the possibility of release (which is another way of saying the defendant will die in prison), then the numbers become much narrower.

46% still favor the death penalty, but a full 41% would choose LWPOR.

So when given a second alternative, support for the death penalty drops by 19% among CT residents. That is a significant fact, which has thus far been overlooked in the reporting.

So they choose the headline “65% back death penalty”, I choose “state split between death penalty and LWPOR”. Which one is more accurate?

[Interestingly, only 6% of voters would let the death penalty issue decide which gubernatorial candidate they'd vote for. Seems like the voters of CT have other things on their minds.]

Trumpeting the statistic that 65% support the death penalty is useless in any event. If the popular opinion for support of the death penalty were a  viable measure, we’d have a big problem on our hands, because the discretion to seek the death penalty lies only with the prosecutor: if 65% of people want the death penalty for murder, then prosecutors have, for a long time, been ignoring the wishes of the public. Only a miniscule percentage of murderers are death eligible and an even smaller percentage have death sought against them. The alternative, of course, is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6chF4bF4QI

Speaking of polls and the death penalty, cue Gov. Rell’s press release in 3…2…1…

Full post as published by A Public Defender on October 13, 2010 (boomark / email).