from an editorial
In the 1990s, when Americans approved the death penalty by sky-high
percentages, Americans were also being killed with sky-high frequency.
There were fewer than 10,000 homicides annually in the United States
in the early 1960s, but three decades later there were more than
24,000. The nation's murder rate soared over the same period, from 5
per 100,000 to 9.5 per 100,000.
It was against that background that support for capital punishment,
which had been falling since the 1950s, began to climb. In 1966,
Gallup found that only 42 percent of the public favored executing
murderers: an all-time low. In 1994, the year Clinton signed that
crime bill, pro-death-penalty sentiment had risen to 80 percent: an
all-time high.
And just as Americans embraced the death penalty when killings were on
the rise, they backed away from it as killings decreased.
After hitting 9.5 in 1994, the murder rate began a downward plunge
that criminologists are still trying to understand. It sank all the
way to 4.4 in 2014 — and as it did, so did public approval of the
death penalty. According to the Pew Research Center, the fraction of
Americans supporting capital punishment dropped to 49 percent in 2016,
the lowest level in four decades.
And since then? In 2014, the pendulum shifted again. Murders and the
murder rate began moving back up. Sure enough, support for the death
penalty did too. It rose to 54 percent in 2018.
To be sure, correlation doesn't prove causation. But six decades of
correlation are hard to discount: The willingness of the public to put
murderers to death rises and falls with the threat murderers pose. If
homicides are back on an upward trend, more and more Americans will
want killers put to death — and more and more politicians will decide
they do, too.
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