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 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.
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