The Crime Report
June 8, 2022
Do you support or oppose capital punishment? That
seems like a straightforward question.
However, once you begin to peel back the layers of
legality, reality and morality, the answer is not as straightforward as one
would expect.
Recently, I had the opportunity to talk about the
death penalty with a group of true crime aficionados at
CrimeCon 2022 in Las Vegas, Nev.
Through the smartphone app, Menti.com, I was able to
interact with my audience in real time. The responses were surprising—and they
offer a glimpse into the subtleties of the death penalty.
The first matter of business was to establish a
baseline for my audience. I asked who supported the death penalty. With nearly
200 responses the audience was evenly split. Forty-one percent supported the
death penalty, 41 percent opposed and 18 percent were unsure.
Then the audience was introduced to the story of
John David Duty. I wrote about Duty in my book The
Executioner’s Toll, 2010, published by McFarland & Company in 2014.
Duty was serving three life sentences in an Oklahoma
prison. In 2001, Duty was 49, and had been in prison since 1978. He didn’t want
to spend any more time in prison.
Apparently he didn’t have the courage to escape or
take his own life.
He decided that he would kill his cellmate, write a
letter to the district attorney, and ask to be sentenced to death—and be
executed—or he would kill again.
At that point, I asked the audience if they would
support the death penalty for Duty. Fifty-five percent of respondents
supported Duty’s execution.
Wait a second: fourteen percent of the audience who
said they opposed the death penalty, or who were “unsure,” voted to execute
Duty.
The group then heard about Roger Coleman. In 1992,
Coleman was executed for raping and killing his 19-year-old sister-in-law.
Before he was executed the Washington Post wrote an editorial about
his innocence.
Pope John Paul II intervened on his behalf. In fact,
Coleman’s photograph adorned the cover
of TIME , with the headline “This Man Might Be Innocent. This Man
Is Due to Die.”
In 2015, thirteen years after his execution,
Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, ordered an unprecedented post-execution DNA
testing of evidence related to Coleman’s case. The analysis confirmed that
Coleman did, in fact, rape and murder his sister-in-law.
Sixty-three percent of respondents supported
Coleman’s execution. More than one in three people who initially indicated they
did not support the death penalty or who were “unsure” voted to execute
Coleman.
Knowing about the heinousness of a crime can set
aside moral apprehensions about the death penalty
When a person knows about the victim, knows about
the heinousness of the crime or the viciousness of the offender, they tend to
set aside their moral apprehensions and support the death penalty.
This phenomenon has played out in high-profile
executions as well.
When the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, was
facing execution, Gallup
found that 67 percent of Americans supported the death penalty, but 81
percent supported McVeigh’s execution.
In 2006, when former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
faced execution, 67 percent of respondents in
a Harris Interactive online poll said they supported the death penalty,
but 82 percent supported Hussein’s execution.
My real-time interaction with a group at CrimeCon
was not a scientific study. But it offers an insight into the complexities of
capital punishment.
Two death penalty trials in Florida within six
months—and a little help from my CrimeCon audience—demonstrate the seeming
arbitrariness of the death penalty.
Markieth Lloyd was convicted of killing a police
officer in Orlando, Fla. Robert Hayes is a serial killer convicted of killing
three sex workers in Daytona, Fla.
When I presented the aggravating and mitigating
factors of each case, 67 percent of the audience voted to send Lloyd to prison
for life. They voted 56-44 to put Hayes to death.
However, in real life the opposite occurred: the
Orlando jury sentenced
Lloyd to death and the Daytona jury sent
Hayes to prison for life.
Today, about 54 percent of Americans support the
death penalty. That number has been falling for about the last quarter century.
The number of death sentences and the number of
executions have declined dramatically over the last ten years. Yet public
opinion with regard to the death penalty is not easy to discern.
For many, support for the death penalty is not a
yes-or-no answer.
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg,
Garbett, Kelly and George. P.C. and the former district attorney of Lawrence
County, PA. He presented The Machinery of Death: Capital Punishment by
the Numbers at Crime Con 2022. He is the author of The Executioner’s Toll,
2010. You can follow him on twitter @MatthewTMangino or contact him at
mmangino@lgkg.com.
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