Adinkrah Mensah, Clemens William M
1 Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI, USA.
2 Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA.
Int J Offender Ther Comp Criminol. 2018 Jan;62(1):229-252. doi: 10.1177/0306624X16643743. Epub 2016 Apr 15.
The U.S. state of Michigan abolished the death penalty in 1846. Since then, several abortive efforts have been made by state legislators to re-establish the death sentence to deal with convicted murderers. Concurrently, some support exists among Michigan residents for the restoration of capital punishment in the state. This article presents the results of the analysis of an attitudinal survey of 116 college students enrolled in three criminal justice courses in a Michigan public university concerning the reinstatement of the death sentence in the state. The data from this exploratory study show that a slight majority (52.6%) of respondents favored reinstatement whereas 45.7% opposed restoration. Advocates and opponents of re-establishment of the death penalty in Michigan provided similar religious, moral and economic arguments proffered by others in previous surveys on capital punishment available in the death penalty literature. The current study makes a contribution to the scant extant literature on attitudes toward the death penalty in abolitionist jurisdictions. As this body of literature grows, it can provide baseline data or information with which to compare attitudes in retentionist states.
美国密歇根州于1846年废除了死刑。自那时起，州立法者为重新确立死刑以惩处已定罪的杀人犯进行了几次无果的尝试。与此同时，密歇根州居民中也有一些人支持恢复该州的死刑。本文呈现了对密歇根一所公立大学修读三门刑事司法课程的116名大学生就该州恢复死刑进行的态度调查分析结果。这项探索性研究的数据表明，略过半数（52.6%）的受访者赞成恢复死刑，而45.7%的人反对恢复。密歇根州死刑恢复的支持者和反对者给出了与死刑文献中以往关于死刑的调查中其他人提出的类似宗教、道德和经济论据。当前的研究对废除死刑司法管辖区内关于死刑态度的稀少现存文献做出了贡献。随着这一文献体量的增长，它可以提供用以比较保留死刑州态度的基线数据或信息。
