Decreasing Support for D/P in Texas After

Karla Faye Tucker’s

Execution

The days leading up to Karla Faye Tucker’s execution saw numerous protests, like this one outside City Hall. Pollsters suspect that the attention bestowed on the Houston pickax murderer is partly responsible for a dramatic decrease in support for capital punishment. However, supporters see capital punishment as "just and deserved punishment," said Tim Flanagan, dean of the criminal justice college at Sam Houston State University. "So even if the alternative of life without parole existed….they would not be satisfied."

Texan’s support of the death penalty has slipped to its lowest point in more than 3 decades, and some say that’s the legacy of Karla Faye Tucker, who was put to death last month amid an international outcry to spare her.

A new Scripps Howard Texas Poll found 68% of Texans favor capital punishment, down a whopping 18 percentage points from a 1994 survey, the last time the Texas Poll questioned people about their views on the subject.

That is the lowest approval rating the Texas poll has found in a decade and perhaps the lowest since the 1960s, when executions were carried out by electrocution. A 1953 Gallup Poll found that 63% of Texan’s supported the punishment scheme, and a 1966 poll found only 42% favored it.

"Some of it has got to be people re-evaluating their opinion in light of the Karla Faye Tucker execution," Texas Poll Director Ty Meighan said of the new survey findings. "The whole Karla Faye Tucker deal focused people on this issue. That’s got to have something to do with it."

Although a Houston Chronicle poll conducted in late January, just days before Tucker was executed, found a slightly lower (61%) approval for capital punishment, pollsters said at the time that the numbers were suppressed because of polling techniques they used in that study.

Tucker, the first woman put to death in Texas since 1863, was given a lethal injection for the pickax slaying of a Houston man in 1983.

Earlier Texas Polls on the subject found 86% in 1988.

In the current survey, 26% of those interviewed said they oppose the death penalty, perhaps one of the highest disapproval ratings ever, and only 6% were neutral or said they did not know how they feel. In 1994, the last time such a poll was taken, only 7% of Texans were outright opposed to capital punishment. In 1992, the percentage of opponents was 14% and in 1986 it was 10%.

The telephone survey of 1,001 adult Texans has an error rate of plus or minus 3 percentage points, meaning responses could vary by that much in either direction.

Tim Fanagan, dean of the criminal justice college at Sam Houston State University, said the Texas poll findings are consistent with other state and national polls, which have shown declining support for capital punishment in recent years. A 1997 Texas Crime Poll, which SHSU conducted, showed 76% of Texans favor capital punishment – a drop of 16 percentage points from what the 1977 SHSU study showed.

But Flanagan added that the 18 percentage point drop in support for the death penalty that the Texas Poll registered since 1994 is "remarkable".

"I think probably the only thing you can read fairly into (the survey findings) is that it is a more considered view because all of the attention that was given to the death penalty surrounding the execution of Karla Faye Tucker," he said. "If you believe that the media has an educational value at all, then people obviously – if they were open-minded and they listened and they read the papers and so forth – learned some things about capital punishment as a result of the debate over Karla Faye Tucker (and) that when people think about it in the light of more information, maybe support is not quite as strong as what we think."

Dianne Clements, president of Justice for All, a victim’s rights organization, had no doubt the Tucker case affected the survey results, but she is equally adamant that support would not vanish and would actually rise if Texans knew "the truth" about capital punishment.

"I think (the drop in support) is a direct result of the media campaign that was waged by Karla Faye Tucker and her supporters," Clements said. "Their public relations campaign was very effective. They brought her to our living rooms and wanted to make her a part of our lives."

Clements also said the survey emphasizes that a majority of Texans continue to support capital punishment.

"Clearly 68% is still huge majority," she said. "I don’t think support will wane…If people knew the truth about the death penalty, support would rise dramatically."

She said "the truth" about the death penalty includes such aspects as its deterrence factor, cost, and application by race and ethnicity.

Despite the overall drop in support for the death penalty, the Texas Poll also found that supporters are hardening their position.

Some 77% of death penalty advocates said they would still support capital punishment even if they knew a convicted murderer could instead be given a life sentence without the possibility of parole. By comparison, the 1992 Texas Poll found that only 50% of death penalty advocates continued their hard-line approach if given the alternative of life without the possibility of parole.

That suggests, says SHSU’s Flanagan, that death penalty advocates base their support not on whether it’s a deterrent to crime but largely on retribution factors. "They see capital punishment as just and deserved punishment," Flanagan added. "So even if the alternative of life without parole existed… they would not be satisfied."

He added, though, that abolitionists tended to be equally inflexible in their views and unlikely to change their minds even if there were convincing evidence to show that execution were a deterrent to crime.

That means, Flanagan added, "that on both sides, people’s attitudes about capital punishment are based on lots of considerations and prevention of crime is only one of those considerations."

Other findings of the Texas Poll show:

• Strong support for changing the law, with 72% of respondents saying they would favor allowing convicted felons to be sentenced to life in prison with no chance of being paroled.
• A majority of Texans – 57% --favor putting condemned people to death, even if they have turned their lives around in prison.
• Strong support for the current law, which does not give the governor the independent authority to commute a death sentence with approval of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. Some 62% of respondents said they would not support a change in that law, compared with 33% who would and 5% who had no answer.

Flanagan said the survey findings on that question are "interesting, very interesting. If you assume that, in a lot of different contexts, there’s declining trust in government, that across the board people have less confidence in leaders and so forth, then you would expect that people are comfortable with this notion that the governor can’t act independent of the parole board," Flanagan said.

"They like the additional protection that the parole board gives them…

That’s no reflection on Governor (George W. Bush) or anyone else. It reflects sort of a declining confidence in political institutions."

The commutation process became an issue during the Tucker debate because the prisoner who claimed to be a born-again Christian – sought and was denied a formal, trial-like hearing before the 18-member board. It ultimately rejected Tucker’s request for clemency, taking the matter out of Bush’s hands.

Additionally, the Texas Poll found that when political party affiliations are factored in Republicans overwhelmingly support in the death penalty – 86% -- compared with 67% in East Texas, 71% North, 70% Gulf, 66% South and 63% Central.

Texans also are split over whether the death penalty helps prevent crime. 50% say it does, but 44% percent say it doesn’t and 6% don’t know

(source Houston Chronicle)