21%: Death penalty for a serial child molester
Amid the Penn State child sex abuse scandal, we wanted to know what Americans think would be appropriate punishment for a convicted serial child molester.
Here is how they responded: 28% favored more than 20 years imprisonment, 27% 10-20 years imprisonment, 21% death penalty, 16% imprisonment of 5-10 years, 3% less than five years imprisonment, and 5% expressed no opinion on the question.
Young people – 18-29 year olds – were most in favor of the death penalty (32%).
Our scientific telephone survey of 1,200 registered voters nationwide was conducted November 13, 2011 and has a margin of error of +/- 3%. Poll results are weighted to be a representative sampling of all American adults.
What do you think? Vote in our online companion poll and comment below.
The online companion poll in which you can vote provides unscientific results, meaning it’s a tally of participating Poll Position users, not a nationally representative sampling.
Poll Position is committed to transparency and upholding the highest professional standards in its polling, explaining why we provide you with the crosstabs of our scientific polls. Crosstabs provide a breakdown of survey participants by age, race, gender, and political affiliation. Here are the crosstabs for this poll: Poll Position crosstabs – sentence convicted serial child molester.
You can learn more about our polling methodology here.
The “10-20 years imprisonment” sentence seems terribly insufficient unless it would pertain to each offense. I’m not entirely against the Death Penalty; however, I think the poll would be more complete if one of the options was “Life without parole.”
Why isn’t life in prison a choice??????