<P> Around 1890, a political movement developed in the United States to mandate private executions . Several states enacted laws which required executions to be conducted within a "wall" or "enclosure", or to "exclude public view". Most states laws currently use such explicit wording to prohibit public executions, while others do so only implicitly by enumerating the only authorized witnesses . </P> <P> All states allow news reporters to be execution witnesses for information of the general public, except Wyoming which allow only witnesses authorized by the condemned . Several states also allow victims' families and relatives selected by the prisoner to watch executions . An hour or two before the execution, the condemned is offered religious services and to choose his last meal (except in Texas which abolished it in 2011). </P> <P> The execution of Timothy McVeigh on June 11, 2001, was witnessed by over 200 people, most by closed - circuit television . </P> <P> Gallup, Inc. monitors support for the death penalty in the United States since 1937 by asking "Are you in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder?" Gallup surveys document a sharp increase in support for capital punishment between 1966 and 1994 clearly in response to rising violent crime rates during this period (e.g. Page and Shapiro 1992 .) However, with the dramatic surge in arguments questioning the fairness of the sentence (due, in part, to DNA exonerations of death row inmates in the national media in the late 1990s (Baumgartner, De Boef, and Boydstun 2004 The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence), support then began to wane, falling from 80% in 1994 to 66% in 2000 . Moreover, approval varies substantially depending on the characteristics of the target and the alternatives posed, with much lower support for putting juveniles and the mentally ill to death (26% and 19%, respectively, in 2002) and for the alternative of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (52% in 2003) Gallup 2005). Given the fact that attitudes toward this policy are often responsive to events, to characteristics of the target, and to alternatives, the conventional wisdom--that death penalty attitudes are impervious to change--is surely overstated . Accordingly, any analysis of death penalty attitudes must account for the responsiveness of such attitudes, as well as their reputed resistance to change </P>

Laws on capital punishment in the united states