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Many Americans say they support capital punishment. But we have known for a long time that the more people know about it, the less they like it.

More than 50 years ago, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall observed that the key issue in understanding public attitudes toward the death penalty is “not whether a substantial proportion of American citizens would today, if polled, opine that capital punishment is barbarously cruel, but whether they would find it to be so in the light of all information presently available.” This information, Marshall predicted, “would surely convince average citizens that the death penalty was unwise.”

Since he made that pred

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