RALEIGH — It’s happened again.

Several months ago, I wrote about the premature reports of the demise of capital punishment. Far from gaining significant ground in their efforts to eliminate the practice, death-penalty foes had succeeded over the past decade or so only in reducing public support from overwhelming to merely a clear majority. In this, most Americans demonstrate their common sense and their sense of justice — not, as critics maintain, their blood lust or lack of sophistication.

There was actually a larger minority of Americans against the death penalty 40 years ago than there is today. Our society has changed a lot since then, both in positive and negative ways, but the consensus that some egregious crimes can only be justly punished with death remains relatively solid.

What’s amazing is how little the polling numbers have changed on capital punishment given that many of the publicly reported surveys appear to me to be clearly biased in favor of the abolitionists. For example, one common trick is to ask respondents whether they favor capital punishment or life in prison without any possibility of parole. This seemingly straightforward question contains at least two invitations to confusion. First, some may (properly, in my view) consider the second option to be only theoretical. That is, they may hear that government will keep criminals in prison for life without parole, but they aren’t really sure that the promise will be kept.

Thus they could pick the life-sentence option if it is a poll question. But in the real world, they may still support capital punishment as the only sure means of preventing a cold-blooded murderer from killing again. Given what happened recently to a convicted pedophile in a New England prison — he was murdered by a fellow inmate, in for life — the share of Americans in this camp could well grow.

Second, and more importantly, these kinds of questions don’t distinguish between murders in general and the kind of egregious murders for which most people think capital punishment is a proper societal response.

In a new poll commissioned by The News & Observer of Raleigh, the flawed question design was repeated and, arguably, worsened. This time, the question was specific to the type of death penalty North Carolina currently uses. It asked whether respondents supported death by lethal injection for first-degree murderers or life in prison without parole. More North Carolinians picked the death penalty (49 percent) than life in prison (42 percent). But I suspect that the first number would have been higher if lethal injection had not been included in the question. Why was it? There are some respondents who might believe that lethal injection is an objectionable way to put someone to death. Presumably, the intent of the question was to test the death penalty vs. an alternative, not to mix up the whether and the how.

On the moratorium issue itself, most North Carolinians (53 percent) rejected the idea (never mind the headline the Winston-Salem Journal put on this AP version of the piece; the editor simply misread it).

Again, I respect the heart-felt views of those who oppose capital punishment. Some truly do have concerns about its arbitrary use, the potential for mistakes, and the possibility of racial bias. Most simply oppose capital punishment on principle, regardless of how it is applied, thinking it wrong to take a life (some of these point to the biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” a mistranslation that has sowed confusion and spawned misguided pacifism for centuries).

But let’s be clear about this: most North Carolinians, and most Americans, do not share their views. Justice still prevails.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.