
It is important to note here that even the idea of “making hanging an election issue” would seem foreign to American citizens who expect their political leaders to vote alongside the majority of constituents on all issues. Indeed, many speeches on the floor referred directly to the concept of Burkean trusteeship, a political theory of representation that “allows elected representatives to deny their constituents on matters of high principle" (Hammel 2011, 203).
One of the most surprising findings in the documentary analysis was that even the British public celebrated Parliament's detachment from popular opinion. For example, in The Times in February 1965, R.A. Bickford Smith wrote in a Letter to the Editor, "is an appeal to public opinion valid in this matter of social advance? I would suggest that on occasion public opinion should be led rather than be allowed to do the leading" (Bickford Smith 1965). Several other Letters to the Editor were published in The Times from 1965 to 1969 that supported the sentiment of Bickford Smith. The discourse analysis suggests that this type of Burkean trusteeship was accepted by at least some of the British public as a legitimate approach to political representation on the issue of death penalty abolition.
2. The United States: A Failed Moratorium
Curiously, when the British Parliament approved the Murder Act of 1965 against the will of 80 percent of their constituents, American support for the death penalty was at an all-time low. In 1966, a Harris Survey indicated that only 42 percent of Americans supported the death penalty (Bohm 2003, 31). In fact, Gallup polling of death penalty support in the United States from the 1930s onward has revealed a v-shape progression with the 1960s as the nadir (Gallup 2012). The American government launched into its own experimental moratorium in 1972 when the Supreme Court ruling in Furman v. Georgia temporarily halted executions for four years. The justices' decision to evaluate capital punishment in Furman was heavily influenced by public opinion polling and a decline in public support was cited as a potential measure for "evolving standards of decency" (Falco and Freiburger 2011, 1).
In 1972, Gallup tracked the fluctuation of death penalty opinions surrounding the Furman announcement. In the pre-Furman poll, 50 percent of Americans supported the death penalty. According to the post-Furman polling data, four months after the ruling, support for the death penalty had increased by 7 percentage points (Bohm 2003, 31). Death penalty issues received significant media attention until 1976 when Gregg v. Georgia ruled that capital punishment was not "cruel and unusual” and therefore dissolved the de facto moratorium in the states. Since it was unlikely that the Gregg v. Georgia decision would be reversed in the next few decades, the opportunity to review the constitutionality of state execution, a process supposedly independent from public opinion influence, was exhausted for the time being.
As the issue of the death penalty received heightened media attention and scrutiny in the 1970s, public opinion was treated as the most important barometer for the legitimacy of capital punishment in America. In fact, many Americans launched petition campaigns to restore the death penalty in states during the Furman moratorium period. For example, in March of 1972, an organized effort to gather more than a half a million signatures for a constitutional amendment to restore the death penalty was supported vigorously by then Californian Governor Ronald Reagan (“A Death Penalty is Petitions Aim" 1972). A state senator was quoted in the New York Times for suggesting, "this question will never be properly resolved until the people have had the opportunity to decide the issue” (“A Death Penalty is Petitions Aim" 1972).
Furthermore, many politicians suggested that state legislators should find a way to subvert the Furman moratorium in order to better represent the will of their constituents. For example, NY Assemblyman Vito P. Battista was quoted in the New York Times for a