U.S. public opinion on the death penalty depends on details : NPR

U.S. public sentiment about the death penalty has come to the forefront after President Trump gave his blessing, then backtracked, to livestreaming an execution via firing squad.

That planned execution comes after two botched Tennessee lethal injections this year, where the state struggled to find veins to administer death-inducing drugs to Christa Pike and Tony Carruthers.

Speaking at a press conference a day after Pike’s failed execution, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said Tennesseans were disappointed about what happened.

“The people of Tennessee have determined that the death penalty is an appropriate penalty for the most heinous crimes in this state,” he said. “The people of Tennessee make that decision and my job is to make sure that those sentences are carried out.”

Those Tennesseans join some two-thirds of Americans who support the death penalty for people convicted of murder, according to a Pew Research Center poll from this summer. According to PRRI, a nonpartisan nonprofit, people that favor the punishment tend to be Christian, white and vote Republican.

Daniel LaChance, a history professor at Emory University, says the overall numbers mask a wide range of opinions.

“ Support for the death penalty in the United States is a mile wide and an inch deep,” says LaChance, who also wrote the book “Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States.”

That’s because the polling is incredibly nuanced, LaChance said. When polls offer more variance in the questions, such as life without parole, 60% of Americans support that over the death penalty. The number drops even further when monetary support to the victims’ family members is an option.

And separate 2025 polling from Gallup — which has been tracking support for the death penalty since 1937 — shows that 52% of Americans support the death penalty if a person is convicted of murder, the lowest share in more than 50 years.

The change in public opinion 

The Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that tracks the use of the death penalty but does not take a position on it, has counted 203 people since 1972 who were exonerated after being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death.

“Those are just the ones we know about,” says Robin Maher, the nonprofit’s executive director. “We don’t know how many innocent people were executed before we learned about their claims.”

The wrongful death sentences, plus the moral efficacy, are what is swaying the public’s opinion, Maher said.

“For the public to realize that the death penalty system was fallible, that it made serious mistakes, raised a lot of issues in people’s minds about whether this very costly public policy, that was nonetheless rather inaccurate and unfair, should be used,” Maher said.

The Pew Research Center study from July also found that while most people support the death penalty for crimes like murder, some 59% of respondents in the survey said the death penalty does not deter people from committing serious crimes – versus 39% who believe it does.

Six states were responsible for the 31 executions in 2026 — even though 27 states still legally allow the most severe form of punishment in this country. Florida led the way, with more than half of the executions this year.

Maher says that the fact that more than half the states allow capital punishment, but are issuing fewer death sentences, shows that the American people are disenchanted with the use of the death penalty.

“ More often than not, they are finding it is not the right answer to violent crime,” she says. “Executions on the other hand, are the result of what a handful of elected officials in just a few states are doing.”

Texas accounts for the most executions since the 1970s, while Michigan holds the title for the longest-running death penalty abolition in the U.S., after banning the practice in 1847.

Out of public sight

The planned execution by firing squad is of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 in 2009. It’s slated for December but appeals could delay it further.

While 52% of Americans support Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan’s execution, 80% say his death should not be livestreamed, according to an October poll from ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos.

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced earlier this month that Hasan would be executed publicly, the U.S. also hadn’t conducted a high-profile public execution in 90 years.

In certain parts of America, quasi-public executions drew up to 10,000 viewers in the past, said LaChance, the Emory history professor. But the growing use of medicine such as anesthesia began a negative shift in public executions.

“ Pain, especially in public spaces, starts to seem scandalous,” LaChance says. “It’s preventable now. It starts to seem barbaric.”

LaChance also said the public, especially in immigrant communities, would turn the executed into heroes. “They would claim the body and conduct little parades in Lower Manhattan, celebrating the life of the person who had been put to death,” he said.

One U.S. official who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution said President Trump was talked out of a livestream execution because it was against American values — but also because there was concern the tape would show up on Jihadi websites, leading to an increase in recruits and possible danger to U.S. forces in the Middle East.

“ That’s the story of the death penalty,” LaChance says. “People didn’t want public executions to disappear when they did. Elites did because they were becoming embarrassing carnivals.”