U.S. Death Penalty Has (Shrinking) Majority Support

According to a Gallup poll, support for the death penalty in the United States has fallen to its lowest level in over 50 years in 2024. Although proponents were in the majority at 53 percent when the survey was last carried out in October, this number is still a far cry from earlier levels of support, which reached a high of 80 percent in 1994.

Public sentiment understandibly changed as more and more U.S. states abolished the death penalty, beginning with New York in 2004 and New Jersey in 2007. Other states have since put moratoriums on capital punishment. More recently, starting in the 2010s, botched executions by injection might have also swayed public perception as states scrambled to secure alternative lethal drugs due to EU export blocks. In 2019, 60 percent of Americans said that they prefered life imprisonment without the possibility for parole to the death penalty in the case of murder.

However, the Gallup survey also shows that the remaining proponents of the death penalty have strong opinions about it. 39 percent of Americans told Gallup in 2023 that the death penalty was not used enough. 27 states currently have active death penalty laws, but only 17 have executed prisoners in the past 10 years (14 in the past five years), showing that capital punishment has become another entry on the list of the many contentious issues dividing the United States.