Strange death-penalty poll

The following poll about Singapore's execution of an Australian-born drug pusher is very odd indeed:

"A poll showing almost half of Australians believed convicted drug smuggler Nguyen Tuong Van should be executed reflected their hate of drug pushers, Opposition Leader Kim Beazley said today. A Morgan Poll conducted last night found 47 per cent of Australians believed the Melbourne man should go to the gallows. But 46 per cent said the death penalty should not be carried out and seven per cent were undecided....

He was sentenced to death after he was caught at Changi airport in December 2002 with almost 400g of heroin in his possession.

The poll also found that only 27 per cent of Australians believed the penalty for murder should be death. The pollster said this was the lowest rating ever recorded and was down 26 per cent since August 1995".

Gary Morgan is a respected pollster, though some of his methods have been called into question in the past. So how do we understand the extraordinary low percentage reported as favouring the death penalty generally? In Australia, as in most of the Western world, the death penalty almost always has majority support. It's possible that Gary did a "quick and dirty" poll that ran into a large sampling error and that seems to me the only possible explanation for such a totally out-of-the-park result. I suppose, however, the result could also reflect the huge media hype about the Nguyen case. Perhaps all the hype about what a lovable guy Nguyen was tended to put people off the death penalty who normally would support it. But whatever the distorting influence was, it is clear that the results report a falsely high level of permissiveness. If such distortions were removed, the conclusion has to be that the great majority of the Australian public were NOT bothered by the execution. Drug dealers are widely regarded as death-dealers so that would be entirely understandable. I suspect that the following comments by Yarra Life are more representative than Gary Morgan's poll:

"Let's get this straight. As refugees from Vietnam, the Nguyen family found a haven in Australia, which welcomed them, gave them succour, a new way of life and citizenship. The Nguyen sons expressed their gratitude by becoming a drug user and a drug runner and thereby posing a threat to hundreds, even thousands, of young Australians. And now they are once again pleading for our charity and have waged such an effective campaign that the bleeding hearts see them as saints rather than sinners. No way"

(For more on polls generally, see here)

Comments? Email John Ray