"i hope someone murders your mother!": an exploration of extreme support for the death penalty

Although general support for the death penalty is decreasing, a segment of the pro-death penalty population continues to support capital punishment with great vehemence. Extreme support for the death penalty is expressed through angry, confrontational, and sometimes threatening verbal attacks against condemned prisoners and opponents of capital punishment. Expressions of this support are especially strong around the time of highly publicized executions. This paper explores extreme support for capital punishment in the months before and after Tennessee's first execution in 40 years, using data gathered from newspaper reports, letters to the editor, interviews with death penalty opponents, and the authors' own experiences. Linking Bowers and Pierce's brutalization theory with community psychology theory, we explore ways in which highly publicized executions seem to unleash of hatred and violent intention among a number of death penalty supporters and how this behavior may illuminate research of increases in homicide after highly executions.