American support for the death penalty is at its lowest level in 39 years, according to a new Gallup Poll.
Sixty-one percent of Americans approve of using the death penalty for people convicted of murder, the poll released last week said. That's a 19-percentage-point drop over the past 17 years and a 3-point drop from last year, when 64 percent of Americans polled said they supported the death penalty. In 1972, 49 percent of Americans polled supported the death penalty. That year was also when the U.S. Supreme Court suspended the death penalty. Executions resumed in 1977.
The poll also found that 52 percent of Americans said the death penalty is applied fairly, down from 58 percent last year, and 40 percent of Americans believe the death penalty isn't imposed often enough. Republicans, men, whites and Southerners are more likely to support the death penalty, the poll found.
The poll is based on phone interviews with 1,005 adults in all 50 states and Washington. The interviews were conducted Oct. 6 through Oct. 9. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
"I think it's a sign that the trend is that the public is less and less supportive of actually imposing the death penalty, especially now that we have life without parole," said Mark Rabil, a Winston-Salem defense attorney who handles death-penalty cases and is the co-director of the Innocence and Justice Clinic at Wake Forest University School of Law.
Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O'Neill said he believes there continues to be strong support for the death penalty.
"Therefore, the Forsyth County District Attorney's Office will continue to pursue the law and uphold justice," he said.
O'Neill also said he believes that the death penalty should be reserved for the worst offenders.
Last month's execution of Troy Davis may explain some of the drop in support, the Gallup Poll said. Davis was executed for the 1991 killing of Georgia police officer Mark MacPhail, who was fatally shot while helping a homeless man. The case sparked international protests.
But Jim Coleman, a professor of law at Duke University, said the Davis case alone does not explain it.
"The impact it has is that it reaffirms everything people have learned in the past 40 years," he said.
North Carolina has not had an execution since 2006, when Samuel R. Flippen of Forsyth County was put to death for killing his two-year-old stepdaughter Britnie Nichol Hutton. The state has had ongoing legal challenges about the use of lethal injection, the method used in executions. One of those challenges involves the role of doctors in monitoring lethal injections.
Last year, North Carolina had 13 capital-murder trials and juries handed out four death sentences, including one in Forsyth County. A jury sentenced Timothy Hartford to death for killing Anne Magness. Magness was shot while delivering lunch for Meals on Wheels with her husband, Bill, who was injured in the shooting.
Hartford was also sentenced to life in prison without parole for the shooting death of Bob Denning, the 64-year-old man to whom the couple was delivering lunch.
So far this year, there have been nine capital-murder trials in the state and one death sentence has been handed down. There are three death-penalty trials under way.
Forsyth County hasn't had any capital-murder trials this year, but two are scheduled for next year — Scott Robert Speakman and Jose Merlin Henriquez Portillo. Speakman is accused of killing his landlady, putting her body in a car and setting it on fire in Clemmons. Portillo is accused of attempting to rob a man selling snacks at an apartment complex and then killing him.
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