Student Attitudes Toward Capital Punishment
Kim Haranczak, Chris Kobos and Robert Elgie
Spring 1999
The late 20th C. represents an interesting period in American history with
respect to capital punishment. In 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the
death penalty as then administered. For a short time no prisoners were executed. Then,
in 1976, the Court upheld revised State capital punishment laws. Since then, the number
of states that have authorized the death penalty for certain crimes has increased. By yearend 1997 the death penalty was authorized by the statutes of 38 states. There is
substantial variability from state to state in what are considered to be capital offenses.
For example, in Florida, first-degree murder, felony murder, and capital drug trafficking
are capital offenses. Mississippi adds to capital murder, capital rape and aircraft piracy.
In California the capital crimes are first-degree murder with special circumstances, train
wrecking, treason, and perjury causing execution. New York’s statute designates as
capital crimes first degree murder with 1 of 10 aggravating factors but explicitly excludes
persons determined to be mentally retarded (U.S. Dept. of Justice 1998)
Since capital punishment was effectively reinstated in 1997, both the number of
persons under sentence of death and the number executed have steadily increased. During
1997, 74 prisoners were executed. This was 29 greater than in 1996 and by far the largest
number since the reinstatement of capital punishment. By the end of 1997 over 3,300
persons were under sentence of death. This was five times the number under sentence of
death in 1980 (U.S. dept. of Justice 1998).
As the number of prisoners on death row and the number of executions have
increased, public support for capital punishment has also increased. In the very early
1970s about 50 percent of the population supported capital punishment for murder. By
the early and mid 1990s just over three-quarters of the population favored the death
penalty for a person convicted of murder (Moore 1995). Despite the high degree of
support for capital punishment in the mid 1990s, there does exist some interesting
variability among sub-populations. In the 1995 poll, 89 percent of Republicans supported
the death penalty while only 67 percent of Democrats did. While 81 percent of whites
favored the death penalty for murder, only 56 percent of non-whites did. Gender
differences were more modest with 80 percent of men and 74 percent of women
expressing support (Moore 1995).
The goal of the present paper is to examine attitudes toward capital punishment
more closely among a specific sub-population--undergraduate students enrolled in an
institution of higher education that emphasizes the traditional values of liberal education
and is located in the northeastern region of the U.S. The 1995 Gallup Poll reports that 81
percent of those with some college education and 80 percent of those aged 18-29 favor
the death penalty (Moore 1995). But these categories are, of course, much broader than
our target population. We have two specific objectives. First, we wish to discover
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whether the level of support for the death penalty within our target population deviates
significantly from levels observed in the larger populations of which they are a part. It is
our hypothesis that support for capital punishment will be lower in this sub-population.
We believe that undergraduate liberal arts students tend to be more idealistic and tend to
value human life more highly, at least in the abstract, than the population at-large. As a
consequence they will be less likely to regard arguments for capital punishment that are
grounded in the deterrence value of applying the ultimate sanction for violent crime as
compelling. Second, we wish to explore the factors which cause some students within
this target population to be more supportive of capital punishment than others. In the
following section we identify those factors which we believe will account for the
patterning of support for capital punishment within our target population.
Conceptualization
There are several factors which we believe will influence the level of support
among college students for the death penalty. We have grouped these factors into the two
broad categories of exogenous and intervening variables shown in Figure 1.
STRONGLY
RELIGIOUS
DEATH PENALTY
HAS DETERRENT
VALUE
DEMOCRATS
RACIAL AND
ETHNIC
MINORITIES
HIGH INCOME
FAMILIES
MEN
INNOCENT ARE
RARELY CONVICTED
LITTLE
DISCRIMINATION
OCCURS
SUPPORT FOR
DEATH
PENALTY
BELIEVE CHEAPER
THAN LIFE
IMPRISONMENT
PARENTS
SUPPORT DEATH
PENALTY
Positive Link
Negative Link
Figure 1. Conceptual Model
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Exogenous Variables
The first of our exogenous variables is minority status. We predict that those
students who regard themselves as members of an ethnic or racial minority will be more
opposed to capital punishment than whites. We have both empirical and conceptual
grounds for this hypothesis. Empirically, the 1995 Gallup Poll discovered a 25 point gap
in support for capital punishment between whites (81 percent) and non-whites (56
percent) (Moore 1995). This was the largest difference observed in this poll.
Conceptually, we believe that much of this difference in attitudes toward capital
punishment reflects differences in the degree of faith in the judicial system between these
two sub-populations. Racial and ethnic minorities have often been treated unfairly by the
criminal justice system historically and frequently perceive themselves still to be
vulnerable to unfair treatment. One striking example of this phenomenon is the Rodney
King incident in which perceived unfair treatment generated extensive rioting in the Los
Angeles urban area a few years ago.
Our second exogenous variable is political orientation. The 1995 Gallup Poll
found political affiliation to be one of the strongest predictors of support for capital
punishment. The support for capital punishment in the 1995 Gallup Poll among those
who described themselves as Republican was 89 percent. This was the highest support
level among any group identified in that poll. The support among Democrats (67
percent) and Independents (76 percent) was substantially lower (Moore 1995). This is
not surprising. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Republican Party positioned itself
nationally as the “law and order” or “tough on criminals” party. While we expect the
results among contemporary liberal arts students to be consistent with these findings, we
anticipate that the differences may be more muted. First, crime is not the salient political
issue that it was a few years ago as violent crime rates have declined and the platforms of
the two parties have converged. Second, at a liberal arts college in the northeastern
United States, the ranks of Republicans are apt to contain greater representation by the
more moderate wing of the Republican party than is true nationally.
The third exogenous variable of our model is gender. We predict that women will
express less support for capital punishment than men. There is empirical grounding for
this hypothesis. In the 1995 Gallup Poll there was a 6 percentage point gender difference
in the level of support for capital punishment. While 80 percent of males favored the
death penalty for a person convicted of murder only 74 percent of women did (Moore
1995). Traditional views of the value orientations of men and women lend conceptual
support to these expectations. Women are typically considered to be more nurturing by
nature, to be less violent, and to value family relationships more strongly than, for
example, career goals. But, over time, as career opportunities for women have widened,
women have been encouraged not to conform to gender stereotypes and to pursue
alternative goals more vigorously. We might expect, as a result, to observe some
convergence in value orientations of young men and women, particularly highly educated
young men and women.
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Our fourth exogenous variable is religion. In general, we would expect those who
may be characterized as strongly religious to be less likely to consider the death penalty
to be a suitable form of punishment. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that at
the core of most religions is the belief that all human life is sacred. However, we also
recognize that the doctrines of some religions seem to include some variation of the “eye
for an eye” concept of retributive justice which might be expected to weaken opposition
to capital punishment. In these faiths the death penalty might be considered acceptable so
long as the punishment seems appropriate to the crime.
In the United States as a whole, the representation of fundamentalist religious
traditions containing the “eye for an eye” concept is apparently quite strong. As a result,
support for capital punishment was actually greater in 1995 among those who
characterized religion as “very” (75 percent) important to their lives than among those
who characterized it as “not very” (69 percent) important to their lives (Moore 1995).
But we suspect that, for students of a liberal arts college, the outcome is likely to depend
on the region of the country within which the school is set. We hypothesize that, in a
northeastern school, students who consider themselves to be more religious will be less
supportive of capital punishment.
Our fifth exogenous variable is income. We predict that students from more
affluent households will be more supportive of capital punishment than those from less
affluent households. Wealthy people often view criminals, especially the hardened
criminals who tend to be the major candidates for capital punishment, in the abstract as a
significant threat to their way of life, rather than as individual human beings with rights
and feelings, enmeshed in extenuating circumstances. As a consequence they are less
likely to think of such criminals as capable of being rehabilitated by serving prison time.
Income is likely to have a second, indirect impact on support for capital punishment. On
average it costs over two million dollars to prosecute, convict and execute someone using
the death penalty. This leads some to oppose capital punishment, not on moral grounds,
but on the grounds of cost-ineffectiveness. The affluent may consider the costineffectiveness argument to be less compelling. In the 1995 Gallup Poll support for
capital punishment among income groups of $30,000 and over ranged from 78 to 82
percent. Among income groups under $30,000 support dropped to the 71 to 75 percent
range (Moore 1995). It should be noted, however, that this data did not control for race.
Our final exogenous variable is parental influence. Undergraduate students are
not far removed from the influence of the parental unit. It seems likely that, at this point
in their lives, students whose parents were openly opposed to the death penalty would be
more likely to oppose it themselves. By contrast, students whose parents favored the
death penalty and consistently expressed this position to their children would be more
likely to favor the death penalty themselves.
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Intervening Variables
Our causal model has four intervening variables. These variables embrace
attitudes toward the criminal justice system and opinions regarding two potentially key
capital punishment-related issues. We hypothesize that students who are confident that
our criminal justice system rarely finds innocent people guilty or discriminates against
particular classes of people will be more likely to support capital punishment than those
who consider the system to be significantly vulnerable to error and flawed by
discrimination. They will especially support capital punishment if they regard it as having
significant value as a deterrent against the commission of violent crime and to be a less
costly form of punishment than life imprisonment.
We consider some of these intervening variables to be modestly tied to the
exogenous variables of our model. For example, we believe it likely that opinions
regarding the relatively cost-effectiveness of capital punishment and life imprisonment
will cut across the groupings identified through our model’s exogenous variables. At the
other extreme, we believe that Democrats (with disproportionate representation of and
concern for less mainstream groups), minority students, students from low income
households, and women are less likely to be confident of the even-handedness of the
criminal justice system. Their skepticism will make them less likely to support capital
punishment. Attitudes toward the deterrence value of capital punishment and the
likelihood of innocent people being wrongly convicted occupy intermediate positions in
this sense. We predict that Democrats, minorities, and students from lower income
households will be more likely to perceive the criminal justice system as subject to error
and have less confidence in the deterrence value of capital punishment due to their
greater sensitivity to the social environmental context within which criminal behavior
occurs.
References
Moore, David, 1995. American firmly support death penalty, The Gallup Poll Monthly,
(June 1995): pp. 23-25.
U.S. Department of Justice, 1998. Capital Punishment 1997, Bureau of Justice Statistics
Bulletin. December 1998. (http://www/ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/)
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