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Those are some interesting polls. 64% think the death penalty can be morally justified, 60% say they favor it, so only 4% are balking on practical grounds ... despite 78% saying they don't think there are adequate safeguards to ensure that no innocent person will be put to death. I guess that means a minimum of 75% of Americans think there aren't adequate safeguards to ensure that no innocent person will be put to death but also that the safeguards are adequate to ensure that not too many innocent people will be put to death? I guess that might still be self-consistent, but only if we ascribe a level of non-binary thinking and consideration-of-tradeoffs that I don't usually associate with polling of the general population.
Where are you getting 75% from? The minimum overlap of 64% and 78% is 42%
From a pair of embarrassing mistakes. 73% would be the minimum (counting "64% was really 64.5% rounded down and 60% really 59.5% rounded up" cases) number of people who think there aren't adequate safeguards against a single innocent death but who didn't let that make a difference to their practical vs their theoretical opinions ... but of course I shouldn't have counted people who already think the death penalty is morally wrong in that number, plus I thought about rounding in the wrong direction.
It would be even more interesting if every person who thinks the death penalty isn't morally justified also thinks that its safeguards are perfect, but you're right, there's no inherent incompatibiilty there.
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I’m totally willing to believe that the red tribe elite thinks this way but doesn’t have the vocabulary to express it. An actual conversation I overheard between regional red tribe elites- lower gentry or upper kulaks and their family members here- was almost literally that, it just happened to use a different set of words.
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