In recent months, there has been a resurgence of interest in the death penalty among rightwing politicians in the UK. The leader of Restore Britain, Rupert Lowe, has made a manifesto commitment to holding a legally binding referendum on bringing back capital punishment. The Reform MP Lee Anderson is also in favour of a referendum, arguing that the public would vote in favour of the death penalty.
Such supporters of capital punishment in Britain point to polls such as this “bombshell survey” that supposedly showed 47% of students favoured bringing back the death penalty. But these headlines are misleading, as surveys rarely include details about the grim administration of capital punishment and only present a binary choice of the options. The more information you give the public about the reality of the death penalty, the less support it enjoys.
In the UK, when people are offered specific alternative punishments, the death penalty has historically failed to get majority support, regardless of the crime. Only 35% of respondents believe it should be available as a punishment in all cases of murder, according to YouGov. And in the US, support for capital punishment has steadily declined, from 80% in 1994 to 52% in 2025.
The horrific failed execution of Christa Pike is only the most recent state-sanctioned killing that has gone badly wrong. Lethal injection commands higher support than other methods of execution because it has a medical veneer that makes it seem more “humane”. This myth has sustained the death penalty in the US.
Polling suggests that if states were to switch methods, support would decline. Pike is a woman who suffered horrific trauma from a young age and ended up being tortured by prison officials for more than an hour in a failed attempt to kill her. Campaigners have long argued that Pike, who was sentenced to death in 1996 at the age of 20, shouldn’t be on death row.
At trial, she was presented to jurors as a dangerous killer, rather than a teenager who had suffered extreme, violent abuse since she was a child, including being raped by several strangers. Her ordeal in the execution chamber was a visceral demonstration that there is nothing medical or humane about execution by lethal injection. What we saw was the awful, ugly, indefensible reality of the death penalty.
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