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American support for the death penalty has steadily increased since 1966, when opponents outnumbered supporters, and now in the mid‐1990s is at a near record high. Research over the last 20 years has tended to confirm the hypothesis that most people's death penalty attitudes (pro or con) are based on emotion rather than information or rational argument. People feel strongly about the death penalty, know little about it, and feel no need to know more. Factual information (e.g., about deterrence and discrimination) is generally irrelevant to people's attitudes, and they are aware that this is so. Support for the death penalty has risen for most major felonies. Youth is seen as much less of a mitigating factor than it was 35 years ago, but most people still oppose the execution of the mentally retarded. As crime rates have risen despite repeated promises by politicians to “get tough on crime,” the death penalty has become an increasingly prominent issue in electoral politics, suggesting that public opinion should be an issue of central importance for research. We suggest that future research should focus more explicitly on racial attitudes, on comparisons of the death penalty with specific alternatives, and on the emotional aspects of attitudes toward the death penalty.

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• Page • Misconduct in interrogations, especially violence, has dropped to a small fraction of what we saw for convictions before 2003. • Forensic fraud has declined sharply in all exonerations from convictions since 2003, and among those with forensic evidence problems. On the other hand, the rate of federal white-collar crime exonerations with official misconduct has doubled among exonerations for convictions since 2003.