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More on the Gallup Death Penalty Poll

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Yesterday we noted on this blog that the Gallup Poll found little change in Americans' views on the death penalty.  Well, "little change" isn't news.  It's dog bites man.  So Mark Berman in the WaPo has this story emphasizing the supposedly "botched" executions, plural, in the last year, and implying a sense of wonderment that this didn't change anything.  (Only one actually qualifies as "botched," IMHO.)

Well, why should it?  Do we change our views on any major issue because of isolated problems?  Do air bag recalls make us stop driving cars?  The problems with lethal injection are, for the most part, caused by the opponents of capital punishment, and our response should be to fix the problems, not to abandon a punishment that the vast majority of the American people believe to be the fundamentally right one for the worst murders.

Far worse than this, though, is a link at the bottom of the page, which takes the reader to a May 1 article titled "Everything you need to know about executions in the United States."  I hadn't seen this before.  Turns out that "everything" is the anti-death-penalty crowd's talking points straight down the line.  One misleading half-truth after another. Seriously, if anti-DP propagandist Richard Dieter had written this article himself, this is pretty much how he would write it.  Dieter is quoted twice in the article, without identifying him as an advocate for one side.  Ditto Denno.

It is disappointing to see such shamelessly one-sided coverage in the WaPo, which has generally been more balanced than certain other major newspapers.

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