More Americans favor the death penalty – even as they acknowledge Black people are more likely to be sentenced to death, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center.
Significance: Roughly two-thirds of Americans (66%) are now in favor of the death penalty for people convicted of murder. This is up six percentage points from Pew Research’s April 2021 survey which found 60% of Americans favored the death penalty.
According to the research, nearly half of Americans (49%) note that Black people are more likely than White people to be sentenced to the death penalty for committing similar crimes.
The other half do not agree that Black people are more likely to be sentenced to death for the same crimes.
In the report, the majority of Americans (73%) recognize that there is a chance that an innocent person could be put to death with roughly 25% asserting that there are sufficient measures in place to keep that from happening. Democrats who identify as White (48%) and Black (44%) are less likely than Latino and Asian Democrats (59% for both) to favor the death penalty.
The Power Structure: About two million people are behind bars in the United States. That’s the highest incarceration rate in the world, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons shared that of those incarcerated, 56.8% were White , 38.5% were Black, 3.1% were Native American, and 1.6% were Asian. These racial breakdowns did not include what percent of those incarcerated were Latino. Roughly 14% of the American population is Black, according to the U.S. Census.
“One in five Black men born in 2001 is likely to be imprisoned at some point in their lifetime. People of color remain massively overrepresented in prisons, accounting for nearly 7 in 10 people in prison,” according to the Sentencing Project, a group which advocates for approaches to crime that minimize imprisonment.
The Overlooked Angle: Black and Latino Americans are disproportionately sentenced to death, according to the Center for American Progress. They highlight that Black and Latino people account for 31% of the American population, yet they account for 53% of inmates on death row.
The Equal Justice Initiative says that disproportionate convictions of Black and Latino Americans lead to negative stereotypes and “presumptions of guilt and dangerousness.” These racist ideas about Black and Latino Americans are connected to higher rates of wrongful convictions.
A 2025 report from the National Registry of Exonerations, conducted by the University of Michigan, found that 51% of those exonerated in 2025 were Black and 78% were “people of color.”
Who is Impacted: Black men historically have higher arrest and incarceration rates related to other groups and when compared to their representation in the broader population. A 2023 report from The Sentencing Project found that Black men are 5.5 times more likely to be imprisoned compared to White men. Researchers have long cited racist approaches to policing and sentencing as factors for the disproportionate jailing of Black men.
What Experts Say: “Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America,” civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander wrote in her book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness.”
“Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be Black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be Black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of Blackness in America: Black people, especially Black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be Black.”
In May, congressional lawmakers re-introduced the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act, legislation that prohibits the use of the death penalty at the federal level and requires re-sentencing of those currently on death row.
