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News Tip: Drop in Support for Capital Punishment Due to Exposure of Systemic Flaws, Expert Says

A new Pew Research Center poll shows support for death penalty has dropped below 50 percent

Forrest Norman

A new Pew Research Center poll shows that, for the first time in almost 50 years, support for the death penalty among Americans has dropped below 50 percent.

  • Quote:
    "In 1997, the American Bar Association decided to change the focus in the death penalty debate, from abolition to how the penalty was administered. By doing that, it allowed the public to focus on the flaws in the system and the extraordinary difficulty of fixing the system,” says Duke University law professor James Coleman, director of the university’s Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility. 

    “The assumption was, as Justice Thurgood Marshall predicted in his 1972 opinion in Furman v. Georgia, that once people understood the serious flaws in the system and the likelihood that innocent people would be sentenced to death, their support for the punishment would diminished. That is what we are seeing now.”

  • Bio:
    James E. Coleman is a professor of law at Duke Law School. He directs Duke’s Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility and co-directs Duke’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic. Coleman chaired the ABA Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities from 1999-2000 and chaired the ABA Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project after that. He was a member of the ABA group that proposed the 1997 moratorium on executions until states examined their systems for flaws and fixed them before resuming executions. 

  • For additional comment, contact Coleman at:
    jcoleman@law.duke.edu