Sorry but this is just nonsense. All four schools of Shariah ruled that the punishment for apostasy is death. This is a bland fact of classical Shariah.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam
"In medieval times, the four Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence held that apostasy by a male Muslim is punishable by death, differing on whether to execute the apostate immediately or grant the apostate an initial opportunity to repent and thus avoid penalty. They also differentiated between harmful and harmless apostasy (also known as major and minor apostasy) in accepting repentance."
That's including the Hanafi school. Moreover,
"Almost all scholars hold the opinion that the punishment of apostasy is death penalty. This view point is held by all classical scholars and in the 4 schools of thought."
Honestly you sound like you've been fed a line of reformist modern Muslim argument that tries to whitewash 10 centuries of clear Islamic jurisprudence. Akin to the recent attempts to argue that Aisha was not 9 years old when Mohammed sexed her. Or that jihad means 'spiritual struggle.'
There have been various attempts by modern Muslims to reject classical Shariah in this context, but they are so hypocritical and selective that they have found relatively little acceptance. This is why support for the death penalty against apostates retains remarkably high support among Muslims *even in Western nations*. Efforts to whitewash this are either uninformed -- at best -- or willfully deceptive. Nobody who is actually familiar with Shariah could accept it for an instant.
"A 2007 poll by Policy Exchange revealed that 31% of British Muslims believed that leaving the Muslim religion should be punishable by death."
