Public Opinion And The Death Penalty: A Qualitative Approach

Overview • Brief overview of the article is provided; the thesis of the article is clearly stated.

Falco and Freiburger’s (2011) article entitled Public Opinion and the Death Penalty: A Qualitative Approach deals with the public opinion and the death penalty. More specifically, the authors’ purpose was to “assess the complexity of the public opinion about the death penalty (Falco, & Freiburger, 2011, par.1). The authors also intended to find out if certain public opinion related occurrences were more prone to favor the use of the capital punishment. The problem the authors attempt to address is certainly a valid one. It addresses not only possible consideration from various condition, but also ones of attitudes and understandings. There are

However, “public opinion on capital punishment has been measured in a variety of ways” (Falco, & Freiburger, 2011). Capital punishment is a cross-cultural universal; although exceptions may exist, the evidence shows that most, if not all, societies at one time or another will use the death penalty. Public opinion is often cited as a major factor in whether a country has abolished or retained the death penalty. After all, one could argue that it would be undemocratic for legislators to pass laws that are in direct conflict with strong public sentiment. The United States courts seem to have taken this position in some corporal and capital punishment cases when decisions are based on what the court views as evolving standards of

For instance, the study included non-professional individuals. Results indicated that the scenarios were limited to a particular depiction which does not often happen in death penalty cases. Non-professional individuals do not respond with all their honesty, therefore it is difficult to determine that responses to certain scenarios involving death penalty beliefs if a big portion of the sample does not respond to all of the themes. This example establishes the difficulty in generalizing the study’s results. The evidence could have also benefited from the establishment of a prior data point. In other words, results from this study could have been much more generalizable had participants been surveyed prior to assuming the duties of an operational officer to see if patterns were increased because of police operations or if it was the results of other variables such as the Pennsylvanian culture. Without a prior data point it is extremely difficult to generalize the relationship public opinion and death penalty.

Critique of the Article