After a New York Times headline that said, "Almost as One, Europe Condemns Execution" and another one that said, "Death Penalty Falls From Favor," the newspaper on June 20 ran an unusual editor's note acknowledging that "Because of editing errors, headlines on both articles reflected only one side of the argument." Now the newspaper is at it again, this time with a dispatch from The Hague in the international section of today's New York Times. The Times article today describes a ruling by the "International Court of Justice" in favor of Germany and against America in a case related to the death penalty, and it reports, "The decision against the United States was given wide television coverage across Western Europe, where opposition to the death penalty is strong and at times feeds anti-Americanism."
"Strong" is rather vague. What is exactly the public sentiment in Western Europe about the death penalty? Joshua Micah Marshall wrote about this last summer in The New Republic: "In fact, opinion polls show that Europeans and Canadians crave executions almost as much as their American counterparts do. It's just that their politicians don't listen to them. . . Differences in the way survey questions are framed complicate direct comparisons with Europe. (European polls sometimes pose the question in terms of the death penalty for terrorism, for genocide, for depraved sexual crimes, and so forth.) But, even if you ask the death-penalty question in the more restricted sense that Americans generally understand it--'Do you support the death penalty for aggravated murder?'--you find very few European countries where the public clearly opposes it, and there are a number where support is very strong. In Britain, the world headquarters of Amnesty International, opinion polls have shown that between two-thirds and three-quarters of the population favors the death penalty--about the same as in the United States. In Italy, which has led the international fight against capital punishment for much of the last decade, roughly half the population wants it reinstated. In France, clear majorities continued to back the death penalty long after it was abolished in 1981; only last year did a poll finally show that less than 50 percent wanted it restored. There is barely a country in Europe where the death penalty was abolished in response to public opinion rather than in spite of it."
The Times today seems to be pulling the same stunt it did in yesterday's paper when it asserted that the North American Free Trade Agreement is "politically unpopular" without mentioning the polls showing a significant plurality of the public supports it. Today, the newspaper says that opposition to the death penalty is "strong" without mentioning that support for the death penalty is often even stronger, at least by the measure of opinion polls. It's enough to make a reader wonder whether the Times's assessments of public opinion are driven by reality or by the newspaper's own wishful thinking.