The majority of Americans support the death penalty but nearly 40 per cent think their moral beliefs would disqualify them from serving on a jury in a capital trial, a poll showed yesterday.
Conducted for the Death Penalty Information Centre, a group that opposes capital punishment, the poll showed 62 percent of those surveyed support executing convicted murderers.
But 39 per cent of the 1,000 people questioned in the survey, which had a margin of error of 3.1 percent, said they thought they would be disqualified from serving in a jury in a capital murder case because of their moral beliefs.
"That was higher than we had expected," the information centre's director Richard Dieter said in an interview.
"That says the death penalty is not as strongly embraced," he said. "I think that questions its legitimacy."
The poll also showed about 87 percent believe an innocent person has been executed in the last 15 years, and 58 percent think there should be a moratorium on executions while wrongful convictions and wrongful death sentences are investigated.
"This is ... a confirmation of how powerful these cases of innocence have been about using the death penalty presently and in the future. It shows a distancing by the American public from the death penalty," said Dieter.
"I think we'll see it used less as people are rightly more cautious