But Many Believe It Isn’t Imposed Fairly : 84% in Poll Support Death Penalty

An unprecedented 84% of Americans approve of the death penalty, according to a Media General-Associated Press survey, even though half of them believe the death sentence is not imposed fairly from case to case.

The poll, taken at a time when more than 1,400 inmates are on Death Row, 38 states are empowered to kill them and executions are occurring at an accelerating rate, also says that a majority of people who support the death penalty believe it should not be imposed in all murder cases.

“The first thing that emerges is, support for the death penalty is at an all-time high,” said Philip W. Harris, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Public Dissatisfied

“This poll probably puts support for the death penalty higher than I’ve ever seen before,” said Harris, who helped formulate the questions in the Media General-AP survey.

Crime, and the failure of law officers and courts to curb it, seem to be the prime reasons for the growth in support for capital punishment.

“There seems to be now a resurgence of dissatisfaction about the amount of crime in the streets,” said Walter Berns, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C., and author of the book, “For Capital Punishment.”

Support Unlikely to Drop

And Henry Schwarzschild, director of the capital punishment project of the American Civil Liberties Union, said support for the death penalty was unlikely to drop in the near future.

“We’re not going to get a substantial reconsideration of that until . . . they are no longer quite so afraid of crime,” he said. “I don’t think that is a matter of a year or two, I suspect that may be as long as a generation, almost--10, 15, 20 years.”

When the U.S. Supreme Court set forth death penalty guidelines in 1976, concern focused on how Americans would react to the resumption of executions after 10 years. Would they consider executions justified, or legalized murder?

Since then, 35 men and one woman have been executed, 21 in 1984 and four in the first two weeks of 1985. The ACLU said there may be 50 to 60 executions by the end of the year.

“Everybody was worried about how the public would respond to executions once we really started killing people,” said Harris. “The poll says it (the resumption of capital punishment) has increased strength for the death penalty.”

Support for the death penalty has been growing steadily since 1964, when the Gallup organization said only 45% of Americans supported it. In 1983, the Gallup poll found 72% of Americans supported the death penalty.

But the Gallup poll and others like it gave respondents only two choices: do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder? The Media General-AP poll asked, “In general, do you feel the death penalty should be allowed in all murder cases, only in certain circumstances, or should there be no death penalty at all?”

‘More Accurate Reading’ “The way a question gets asked makes a big difference,” Harris said. “This is probably a more accurate reading of where the American public is. They don’t support it in all circumstances.”

Of the 1,476 adults surveyed nationwide, 57% said the death penalty was appropriate in certain circumstances and only 27% said it should be used in all murder cases. Twelve percent said there should be no death penalty, and 4% weren’t sure.

Those who said it was justified in certain circumstances most often cited such special cases as brutal murders, the murder of children or law enforcement officers, murdering more than one person and murders for hire.

Blacks and whites had significantly different attitudes. Only 8% of blacks supported the death penalty in all murder cases, contrasted with 28% of whites. Twenty-eight percent of blacks said there should be no death penalty, contrasted with 11% of whites. But 58% of each group said they favored the death penalty under certain circumstances.

Issue of Fairness

The Media General-AP poll also said that among those who supported the death penalty, half believed it was not carried out fairly from case to case. Among those who believe the death penalty should be used only in certain circumstances, 53% said they believed it was imposed unfairly.

The majority of respondents also said they believed minorities and poor people were more likely to receive the death penalty than those who are better off.

“It puzzles me greatly that people can say it is unfairly imposed and still advocate it,” said William J. Bowers, director of the Northeastern University Center for Applied Social Research. “You can’t justify a system that is unfair--especially if you acknowledge it.”

The support for the death penalty by people who thought it was unfair disturbed other death penalty opponents, too.

‘Subliminal Racism’

“It’s a country without much of a social conscience right now,” said John Ackerman, a Houston attorney and former president of the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

The fairness question may have an element of “subliminal racism” in it, said Schwarzschild, one of the country’s best known death penalty opponents.

“They feel that the crime comes from those elements of the population towards whom the death penalty is discriminatory,” he said. “And therefore, it is a safety margin in a sense to have the death penalty be a particular threat to them.”

But Harris noted another possibility.

“There must be a pretty strong belief that the death penalty makes a big difference,” he said. “If it didn’t matter, then I think issues of fairness and discrimination would affect public opinion.”