Despite media reports of a "continuing trend" away from concern with such issues as civil rights and desegregation among young people, their opposition to capital punishment is on the rise. PNS commentator Michael Kroll looks at a survey of 250,000 college freshmen across the country and explores this interesting countercurrent. Kroll, an associate editor of Pacific News Service, specializes in criminal justice and death penalty issues.

Politicians who have staked their political fortunes on support for the death penalty should keep an eye on a trend which seems to have escaped notice.

A survey of the social and political views of incoming college freshmen, hailed in the media as indicating record high levels of selfishness and conservatism, nonetheless showed signs of a strong, and continuing, increase in support for the abolition of capital punishment.

Stories on the survey, conducted annually for 30 years now by UCLA's Graduate School of Education, all pointed to declining support for abortion rights, gay rights, and racial desegregation and interpreted this as a sign the new generation is "continuing to embrace more conservative social values," as the Washington Post put it.

According to the Post, researchers concluded that the survey of 250,000 freshmen in colleges and universities around the county indicated "a pattern of growing indifference among many students to important issues in American society."

Yet among this very group, opposition to the death penalty has increased 18 percent over the last three years, with nearly one in four (23.7 percent) of the surveyed freshmen favoring abolition. (Among African-American freshmen, 38.6 percent favor abolition -- but that is another story.)

This shift is consistent with similar findings in the society as a whole. For example, last February a Field Poll in California found a 10 percent drop in support for capital punishment between 1985 and 1997.

It is impossible to know what is responsible for this fall in public support for executions -- just as it is impossible to know why the media have ignored it. Both practicality and principle may play a roll.

On the practical side is the exorbitant costs of death penalty prosecutions. Beyond this, there is mounting evidence that capital punishment is applied in arbitrary fashion, and a growing awareness of the fact that the poor people who reside on our death rows cannot afford the kinds of defense available to the likes of O.J. Simpson or Ted Kaczynski. This undermines a basic tenet of the American character -- the conviction that we are fair and that justice is applied equally.

In addition, since 1973 some 71 individuals serving time -- time measured in years -- on death row have been released as innocent. This, too, undermines faith in the value of a sentence that cannot be reversed. It also raises the distinct possibility that some innocents have already paid with their lives for the mistakes which are inevitably part of any process involving human beings.

Even the President's call for a national dialogue on race may have helped undermined support for capital punishment -- despite Clinton's own support for the death penalty. Study after study shows the death penalty is used against African-Americans far out of proportion to their numbers. The death penalty is also reserved almost exclusively for those who murder whites -- nearly 90 percent of those executed in the last 20 years, although about half of those murdered in the country are African American.

Perhaps what is moving the young to drop their support for the death penalty is their view that government is too big, too powerful, and too intrusive in our lives. While one researcher who worked on the student survey called the results "part of a larger pattern of disengagement of the American people from political and civic life," it is just as likely that this represents not disengagement but re-engagement at the level of community and personal values. Americans of all ages are turning away from government as the solution to our problems, and the death penalty represents the ultimate solution of governments through the ages.