Capital punishment debate in the United States

Capital punishment debate in the United States existed as early as the colonial period. Opposition to the death penalty peaked in 1966, with 47% of Americans opposing it; by comparison, 42% supported the death penalty and 11% had "no opinion." The death penalty increased in popularity throughout the 1970s and 1980s; in 1994, the opposition rate was less than 20%, less than in any other year. Since then, the anti-death penalty movement has strengthened again, and a 2011 Gallup poll showed that 35% of Americans oppose the death penalty, with opposition increasing 75% over the last 17 years.

Arguments in opposition to the death penalty in US include the fact that a significant number of death row inmates are found to be innocent before execution, and that some executed criminals' convictions have been subsequently shown to be unsafe; the disproportionately high chance of poor and ethnic minority individuals to be sentenced to death compared with affluent whites committing similar crimes lack of solid evidence for its deterrent effect; the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause introduced to the US constitution with the Eighth Amendment; and moral relativism, the idea that if it is wrong to kill then it is absolutely not relatively wrong – most religious bodies in the United States oppose the death penalty.

Abolitionists gathered support for their claims from writings by European Enlightenment philosophers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire (who became convinced the death penalty was cruel and unnecessary) and Bentham. In addition to various philosophers, many members of Quakers, Mennonites and other peace churches opposed the death penalty as well. Perhaps the most influential essay for the anti-death penalty movement was Cesare Beccaria's 1767 essay, On Crimes and Punishment. Beccaria’s strongly opposed the state’s right to take lives and criticized the death penalty as having very deterrent effect. After the American Revolution, influential and well-known Americans, such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and Benjamin Franklin made efforts to reform or abolish the death penalty in the United States. All three joined the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, which opposed capital punishment. Following colonial times, the anti-death penalty movement has risen and fallen throughout history. In Against Capital Punishment: Anti-Death Penalty Movement in America, Herbert H. Haines describes the presence of the anti-death penalty movement as existing in four different eras.

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