President Donald Trump recently endorsed, then withdrew support for, livestreaming an execution by firing squad—a reversal that underscored deep divisions over capital punishment even within Republican circles.
The debate was triggered by two botched lethal injections in Tennessee earlier this year. Executioners struggled to locate veins for the death-inducing drugs administered to Christa Pike and Tony Carruthers, drawing national scrutiny to the state's execution practices.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee defended the death penalty a day after Pike's failed execution. "The people of Tennessee have determined that the death penalty is an appropriate penalty for the most heinous crimes in this state," Lee said, adding that his role is to ensure sentences are carried out.
Yet public backing for capital punishment is eroding. A Gallup poll in 2025 found 52 percent of Americans support the death penalty for murder—the lowest share in more than 50 years. A Pew Research Center poll conducted this summer found two-thirds of Americans supported capital punishment overall, but that number masks deeper fractures.
Support tilts heavily toward Christian, white, Republican voters, according to PRRI, a nonpartisan nonprofit. Daniel LaChance, a history professor at Emory University and author of "Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States," characterized support as "a mile wide and an inch deep." When polls offer life without parole as an alternative, 60 percent of Americans choose it over execution. Support drops further when monetary compensation to victims' families is presented as an option.
Exonerations have fueled the shift. The Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit monitoring capital punishment, has documented 203 individuals exonerated since 1972 after wrongful convictions and death sentences. Robin Maher, the center's executive director, said the actual number of innocent people executed is unknowable. "Those are just the ones we know about," Maher said. "We don't know how many innocent people were executed before we learned about their claims."
Maher attributed the changing public opinion directly to awareness of wrongful convictions. "For the public to realize that the death penalty system was fallible, that it made serious mistakes, raised a lot of issues in people's minds about whether this very costly public policy, that was nonetheless rather inaccurate and unfair, should be used," she said.
