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Despite a steady increase worldwide in the number of states that have abolished the death penalty, capital punishment remains a troubling presence in the international order. The world’s leading powers in terms of economics and population include the retentionist states of China, India, Japan and the United States of America (USA). It seems there is no linear path to abolition, and its achievement is indeterminate. Yet, in international human rights law, death penalty abolition is a powerful norm embraced by half the countries across the world. While the majority of death penalty research has emanated from and focuses on the USA, well over 90 per cent of global executions occur in Asia, which lags behind the global trend towards abolishing the death penalty. Our symposium and this collection seek to bring perspectives from a variety of disciplines and methods—historical, legal, sociological, comparative— to bear on the questions of retention and abolition in a variety of jurisdictions and time periods.
This article was first published in Crime Justice Journal: https://www.crimejusticejournal.com/issue/view/119

• Document type Academic report

Given how pressing the problem has become, and the real interest in reforms to promote access to justice, this article takes a different tack than prior habeas reform work: to restore habeas corpus to its pre-AEDPA and pre-Rehnquist court state, in which a federal court can review claims and reach their merits. The approach would preserve flexibility at the district court level and remove the many layers of procedural complexity that the Supreme Court and then Congress have erected. We believe that deep changes are needed, and in that, we agree with judges and scholars that have for some time proposed such changes in the writ. As we describe, AEDPA was enacted as a culmination of more than two decades of complex Supreme Court law that had already limited access to federal habeas corpus. While AEDPA incorporated some of those procedural rulings, the concern would be that should AEDPA be repealed, even in part, those court-made restrictions could be interpreted to supplant AEDPA restrictions. Clear statutory language will be needed to ensure that the Court does not frustrate Congress, as it has in the past, by supplementing statutory text in order to limit constitutional remedies. We do not mean to suggest that the various proposals set out here are exhaustive. Our goal is to promote careful considerations of alternatives to the present-day set of federal habeas corpus statutes and accompanying judicial interpretation.

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Terrorism

The federal death penalty today would be unrecognizable to the founders, who saw the ultimate penalty as a means of protecting sovereign interests and who therefore carefully guarded the practice at English common law of yielding national interests to local ones. Over the course of time, the geographic distribution and substantive basis for the penalty changed, but until the modern era, its underlying purpose did not. As the Trump era executions made painfully clear, however, the federal death penalty today is different. It is disproportionately imposed for crimes that could have readily been prosecuted by other jurisdictions and that have little obvious connection to federal sovereignty, and it is disproportionately imposed against non-white people. By any rational measure, it is vanishingly rare, and it serves no valid penological goal. Simply put, federal death sentences today are, in most cases, “cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.”

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment and Punishment

This article retraces the evolution and recent decline of death peanlty in the United States, notablt through state court interventions. These dynamics between judicial and political action illuminate the importance of state court intervention in the story of the American death penalty’s precipitous decline, which has tended to foreground other institutional actors and to neglect the complex interactions among branches of government. State judicial rulings, though often highly technical and, therefore, less visible and accessible to the public, have been a pervasive and powerful force in the two-decade-long diminution of the practice of capital punishment across the United States.

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Trend Towards Abolition

The protracted and (somewhat) ongoing debate over whether lethal injection—in some or all of its forms—is cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment is the newest variation on the question of whether a particular form of capital punishment is inhumane and cruel. The history of capital punishment in the United States over the last two centuries has been punctuated by attempts to find less painful and gruesome ways to kill persons society has condemned to die. Ironically, at least from a historical perspective, some recent executions have seen condemned inmates or their attorneys elect some of the older methods, i.e., electrocution, or offer, as a potentially less painful alternative, the firing squad or death by lethal gas. And some states, including the main subject of this article, have resurrected electrocution and the firing squad because of a claimed inability or difficulty in obtaining execution drugs. In this article, the authors trace the history of execution methods in the pre-modern era of capital punishment (before 1972), primarily in South Carolina, pointing out the often-intractable problems with their implementation process (including specific “botches”), and then address other aspects of executions that have relevance to the current debate about the wisdom and efficacy of retaining the “modern” American death penalty in the twenty-first century.

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment and Punishment

The numbers and the politics of the death penalty in India tell very different stories, presenting complicated narratives for its future. The public reaction to instances of sexual violence and other offences over the last decade and the consequent political response has significantly strengthened the retention and expansion of the death penalty. This is reflected from the fact that that of all the death sentences that district courts impose, only about 5 percent get confirmed in India’s appellate system. However, does this mean there is growing scepticism about the death penalty in the Supreme Court of India? Unfortunately, the answer is far from simple. An assessment of the death penalty in India’s appellate courts during the last decade will demonstrate that a crime-centric approach has hindered any principled discomfort with the death penalty or the manner of its administration. In particular, the Supreme Court has faltered in high-profile death sentence cases (i.e., offences against the state and sexual violence cases), and its track record of commutations has very little to do with principled considerations on sentencing. This paper argues that the political and judicial imagination of the death penalty, as a necessary part of the response to crime, creates significant and unique challenges for the path towards abolition.
This article was first published in Crime Justice Journal: https://www.crimejusticejournal.com/issue/view/119

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list India

This article primarily focuses on how racial bias creates nearly ubiquitous racial disparities in the imposition of the death penalty; it does so both to amass further reasons McCleskey was wrongly decided, and to point the way forward. Part I provides the necessary foundation by summarizing the history of race and the death penalty in the United States, with a focus on the Supreme Court’s treatment of racial discrimination claims in capital sentencing. Part II, the heart of this Article, examines the multiple psychological mechanisms that create racially biased decision making in capital cases. Understanding those mechanisms further undercuts the Supreme Court’s reasoning in McCleskey and argues for overturning the holding. However, recognizing the reluctance with which today’s Court would view overturning McCleskey, Part III considers whether and how alternative, case-specific uses of the data described in Part II might ameliorate the influence of racial bias in capital sentencing.

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list United States

“The penalty of death is more likely to be imposed on individuals who suffer from various disadvantages: poverty, poor lawyers, mental illness, intellectual deficits, for example. It also is more common among those with white victims compared to minority victims, those who commit crimes in jurisdictions that have previously sentenced more individuals to death, and those who committed their crimes in the 1980s or 1990s as compared to more recent years (see Baumgartner et al. 2018 for details). In this short report I focus on two particular disadvantages: age and minority status.” – Frank R. Baumgartner

Link to the article: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/report-racial-disparities-in-death-sentences-imposed-on-late-adolescent-offenders-have-grown-since-supreme-court-ruling-banning-juvenile-death-penalty

• Document type Academic report
• Available languages

Shattered Justice presents original crime victims’ experiences with violent crime, investigations and trials, and later exonerations in their cases. Using in-depth interviews with 21 crime victims across the United States, Cook reveals how homicide victims’ family members and rape survivors describe the painful impact of the primary trauma, the secondary trauma of the investigations and trials, and then the tertiary trauma associated with wrongful convictions and exonerations. Important lessons and analyses are shared related to grief and loss, and healing and repair. Using restorative justice practices to develop and deliver healing retreats for survivors also expands the practice of restorative justice. Finally, policy reforms aimed at preventing, mitigating, and repairing the harms of wrongful convictions is covered.

• Document type Book
• Countries list United States

The present report provides information on the implementation of General Assembly resolution 75/183. It discusses developments towards the abolition of the death penalty and the establishment of moratoriums on executions and highlights trends in the use of the death penalty, including the application of international standards relating to the protection of the rights of those facing the death penalty. The report discusses conditions of detention for persons on death row, the application of the death penalty to foreign nationals, its disproportionate and discriminatory application to women, its disproportionate impact on poor and economically vulnerable individuals, its discriminatory use relating to persons exercising their human rights, and various initiatives for advancing its abolition. The report welcomes progress made towards universal abolition in States representing different legal systems, traditions, cultures and religious backgrounds. It concludes that all measures aimed towards limiting the application of the death penalty constitute progress in the protection of the right to life.

• Document type United Nations report