Penn State Poll results on death penalty (PDF) January 9, 2007 HARRISBURG- One week after a New Jersey state
commission recommended abolition of the death penalty, a poll released today
establishes that more Pennsylvanians prefer long sentences of incarceration
rather than the death penalty as the punishment for even the worst murders.
As part of the annual Penn State
Poll, the Center for Survey Research at the university's Harrisburg campus found that only 42.9% of
respondents supported the death penalty when presented with alternative
sentences. 45.1% of those surveyed
supported either life without parole (35.5%) or life with parole (9.6%). The remainder of participants answered "don't
know" or refused to answer.
"The public has become increasingly
doubtful about the death penalty as public policy," said Andy Hoover, community
organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which
commissioned the poll with four other groups.
"The people of Pennsylvania
want real solutions to the issue of crime, not an antiquated, malfunctioning
system of capital punishment.
"A temporary suspension of
executions with a comprehensive analysis of how the death penalty is operating
in Pennsylvania
is the responsible thing for our state government to do."
856 statewide participants were
asked, "What do you think should be the penalty for persons convicted of
murder?" The poll was commissioned by
the ACLU of PA, Amnesty International USA, Jewish Social Policy Action Network,
Pennsylvanians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (formerly Pennsylvania
Abolitionists United Against the Death Penalty), and the Pennsylvania Council
of Churches.
The five co-sponsoring
organizations pointed to the data to renew their call for a moratorium on the
death penalty in the Commonwealth.
"When the public sees innocent
people are sentenced to die, it starts to have grave doubts about capital
punishment," Hoover
said, noting the six death row exonerations in the state and 123
nationwide. "The public's doubt
increases when issues are raised around the inability of the poor to get quality
representation, the impact of race, the taxpayers' costs of maintaining the
death penalty, and the ways that capital punishment fails victims' family
members."
The Penn State Poll comes on the
heels of the Death Penalty Information Center's 2006 Year End Report, which was
released on December 14. In the report,
DPIC noted that this year's Gallup Poll showed support for life without parole
trumping the death penalty. The report
also indicated a significant decrease in both death sentences and executions
around the country and moratoria in ten different states.
The Illinois
moratorium instituted by former Governor George Ryan is still in place and is
now joined by the New Jersey
halt to executions. Eight other states
have suspended executions due to concerns around the lethal injection issue.
The poll's
methodological report is available at the website of the Center for Survey
Research, http://csr.hbg.psu.edu/poll.htm.
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