I believed this because I figured the less knowledge one had on the subject of capital punishment, the more inclined they would be to have one pay for their crime with their life. I thought this because those with a lower level of education may not be aware of the many factors, statistics, and potential problems with the capital punishment system. I also figured that those with a lower level of education may not know what a controversial issue capital punishment in America is and that they would base their opinion on the violence they see everyday in the news media, on television, and in video games. My hypothesis is based on the desensitization of today's youth and less educated.
After doing my research, I realized that I wasn't completely wrong, but that I wasn't completely right either. My data was cross-tabulated using MicroCase. In it, I used the question, "What is your position on death penalty: Favor or Oppose?" as the dependent variable, race as the independent variable, and I also controlled for the level of education, (MicroCase 2000). .
The impact of race on one's support for or opposition to capital punishment is evident when looking at public opinion polls and the data from MicroCase. In addition, when controlling for the level of education, a trend develops which displays that as the level of education increases, white support for the death penalty goes up while black support goes down. In order to understand and draw conclusions from this data, it is important to first know the historical background of capital punishment.
The first known execution in the territory now known as the United States was in 1622. Daniel Frank was put to death in the Colony of Virginia for the crime of theft. Since then, the death penalty has become a controversial staple in the American Criminal Justice System. It wasn't until the year 1930 that polling was done regularly to measure people's opinion on the death penalty.
