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In this new fourth edition of HRI’s ‘Global Overview’ series, HRI updates its previous research on the death penalty for drugs worldwide, and it considers critical developments on the issue. While the report notes that there still are a troubling number of governments with capital drug laws, in practice very few states execute people for drugs. The number of people killed for drug-related offences is high because China, Iran and Saudi Arabia are aggressive executioners. Those governments that kill for drugs are an extreme fringe of the international community.

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Despite strong protests from local and international human rights organisations, the new Indonesian administration under President Joko Widodo has executed 14 people, including Indonesian and foreign nationals, in 2015. All of them had been convicted of drug trafficking. In other occasions President Widodo also stated publicly that the government would deny any application for clemency made by people sentenced to death for drug-related crimes. This report, which builds on Amnesty International’s past work over three decades documenting the use of death penalty in Indonesia, includes research carried out during a March 2015 visit to the country. The report highlights 12 individual cases of death row prisoners, out of a total of 131 people on death row, which point to systemic problems in Indonesia’s administration of justice that resulted in violations of international human rights law and standards.

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The annual report of the death penalty in 2010 shows a dramatic increase in the number of executions compared to the previous years. The number of annual executions in 2010 in Iran is probably the highest since the mass executions of political prisoners in the summer of 1988.

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The report describes the federal forensic oversight program; outlines the problems that have plagued the program since its inception (with specific examples): Explains the consequences of the federal government’s inadequate administration of the program; shows how forensic negligence and misconduct lead to wrongful convictions; and gives specific recommendations for what the federal government, states and individuals can do to strengthen forensic oversight.

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In this essay, I suggest a different and particularly feminist reason for reexamining, and rejecting, the death penalty. The death penalty perverts society’s response to the tragedy of a woman being raped and murdered by relying on a form of racism that is gendered in nature and by making the horrific nature of the crime of rape-murder a more important consideration in determining punishment than the individual characteristics of the person who committed it.

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The present report aims to provide an update on the 2007 report, bearing in mind the significant changes that have taken place in Pakistan under various governments since then, including the 2008 unofficial moratorium and the resumption of executions in 2014. The mission aimed at exploring specific issues within the theme of the death penalty, including detention conditions on death row, the use of capital punishment for minors, and the impact of the death penalty on families of death row inmates, particularly their children. However, a recurring theme emerged in discussions about each of these sub-issues: a strong systemic bias against the poor and marginalized.

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The FIACAT and ACAT Liberia organized an awareness-raisingworkshop on 17 and 18 September 2019 in Monrovia (Liberia) for 30 participants: Muslim and Christian religious leaders, traditional chiefs, members of civil society organizations, journalists, members of the Independent National Commissionon Human Rights (INCHR) and parliamentarians. This workshop resulted in the production of this publication to raise awareness among opinion leaders on the abolition of the death penalty in Liberia, considering the specific characteristicsand needs of the country.

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Executionhas also (1) had a powerful negative influence on the substantive criminal law; (2) promoted the practice of using extreme penal sanctions as status rewards to crime victims and their families; (3) provided moral camouflage for a penalty of life imprisonment without possibility of parole, which is almost as brutal as state killing; and (4) diverted legal andjudicial resources from the scrutiny of other punishments and governmental practicesin an era of mass imprisonment. This chapter discusses these four latent impacts of attempts to revive and rationalize the death penalty in the United States.

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In this joint letter many Iranian and international human rights organizations, urge the governments they called to support the renewal of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, during the 37th session of the UN Human Rights Council.

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Two-page guide with tips and contacts for individuals interested in getting started in anti-death penalty activism in the US.

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The second edition of America’s Experiment with Capital Punishment is an updated and expanded version of the comprehensive first edition. Chapters, authored by the country’s leading legal and social science scholars, have been revised to include a host of important developments since the 1998 edition. Thus, new evidence and information is presented concerning racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty, wrongful convictions, deterrence, the prediction of future dangerousness, jury decision-making, public opinion about the death penalty, the effects of the capital punishment process on murder victims’ and offenders’ relatives, death row incarceration, the costs of capital punishment, execution methods, and many other issues.

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This book examines the death penalty within the changing socio-political context of China. The authors’ treatment of China’s death penalty is legal, historical, and comparative. In particular, they examine; the substantive and procedures laws surrounding capital punishment in different historical periods the purposes and functions of capital punishment in China in various dynasties changes in the method of imposition and relative prevalence of capital punishment over time the socio-demographic profile of the executed and their crimes over the last two decades and comparative practices in other countries. Their analyses of the death penalty in contemporary China focus on both its theory – how it should be done in law – and actual practice – based on available secondary reports/sources.

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DPIC’s 2016 Year-End Report: another record decline in death penalty use in the US. A video summary of the report.

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This article deals with one of the main arguments of defenders of the capital sentence: is the death penalty a source of relief for the victims?

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This book examines how family members and advocates for victims address the impact of capital punishment. The book presents the personal stories of victims’ family members and their interactions with the criminal justice system. It also examines the relevant areas of legal research, including the use of victim impact evidence in capital trials, how capital punishment affects victims’ family members, and what is known about addressing the needs of the survivors after a murder.

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Lawyers are generally familiar with the ethical rule forbidding frivolous arguments, principally because of sanctions imposed under rules of civil procedure for making such arguments. Not all lawyers are aware, however, of two ways in which the prohibitions of frivolous arguments are restricted in both the rules themselves and in their enforcement. First, the ethical rules have express limitations with respect to arguments made on behalf of criminal defendants, and courts are generally loath to sanction criminal defense lawyers. Second, the term “frivolous” is narrowed, even in civil cases, by the way it is defined and explained in the ethical rules and in court decisions.

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In this book Beth Berkowitz tells the story of modern scholarship on the ancient rabbinic death penalty and continues the story by offering a fresh perspective using the approaches of ritual studies, cultural criticism, and talmudic source criticism. Against the scholarly consensus, Berkowitz argues that the rabbinic laws of the death penalty were used by the early Rabbis in their efforts to establish themselves in the wake of the destruction of the Temple. The purpose of the laws, she contends, was to create a complex ritual of execution that was controlled by the Rabbis, thus bolstering their claims to authority in the context of Roman imperial domination.

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PowerPoint presentation used at The Advocates for Human Rights’ training session on death penalty advocacy for the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review of human rights. See also the video of the presentation here.

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While most western democracies have renounced the death penalty, capital punishment enjoys vast and growing support in the United States. A significant and vocal minority, however, continues to oppose it. Against Capital Punishment is the first full account of anti-death penalty activism in America during the years since the ten-year moratorium on executions ended.

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The Flynn Effect is a well documented phenomenon demonstrating score increases on IQ measures over time that average about 0.3 points per year. Normative adjustments to scores derived from IQ measures normed more than a year or so prior to the time of testing an individual have become controversial in several settings but especially so in matters of death penalty litigation. Here we make the argument that if the Flynn Effect is real, then a Flynn Correction should be applied to obtained IQs in order to obtain the most accurate estimate of IQ possible. To fail to provide the most accurate estimate possible in matters that are truly life and death decisions seems wholly indefensible.

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This document looks back at the death penalty in 2007 beginning with the New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission releasing its final report recommending abolition and concluding with the UN General Assembly passing a landmark resolution calling for a global moratorium. It includes death by electrocution; abolition; execution, commutation and stay of execution; mental illness; child rape as well as geographical and colour bias.

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PRI information kit on the alternative sanctions to the death penalty: ; a review of current practices; the increasing use of ‘life’ and long-term sentences and their contribution to growing prison numbers; 12 steps toward alternative sanctions to the death penalty that respect international human rights standards and norms.

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This report analyses the use of the death penalty in China and examines sentencing patterns and the legislation behind the death penalty.

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The evidence reviewed demonstrates frequent and heavy-handed recourse to the death penalty by Saudi Arabia in recent months. At least 149 people were executed in 2018, with at minimum 46 remaining on death row at the end of the year. A significant proportion of those executed were political dissidents, and a number were children at the time of their alleged offending. Each of these features connotes a grave violation of international human rights norms.

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As this report lays bare, entrenched obstacles within the criminal justice system impede efforts to recognize those with severe mental illness and to treat them fairly. As detailed in this report, these obstacles include the fact that: 1, mentally ill offenders, because of their impairments, often undermine their own defenses in a variety of ways that contribute directly to their convictions, death sentences and executions; 2, although state law exclusively defines mental illness as a mitigating factor for sentencing purposes, juries often perceive mental illness as an aggravating (rather than mitigating) factor. 3, the law governing mental illness in the context of the death penalty does not often align itself with clinical realities; thus mental health experts must often answer legal questions that do not conform to their medical analyses.

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This document focuses on the significant developments and events – both negative and positive – in the struggle against the death penalty in 2006. It includes steps towards abolition; horrific state killings; executions after unfair trials, including that of Saddam Hussein; the growing global campaign for abolition, and the political courage needed to rid the world of judicial state killing.

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That the European area is a zone free of capital punishment is the result of a complex process of restraints that has evolved over the last 50 years. Domestic, regional and universal international law, as well as certain components within each level, have influenced each other to produce a dynamic, circular movement towards abolition. Starting from the internal level, restraints on the death penalty rose up to the regional and universal levels, and then descended back down into domestic law. This process, however, has not produced a completely closed circle, and certain countries in Europe retain legislation permitting recourse to the death penalty for certain crimes, especially war crimes and, according to recent interpretations, criminal offences related to terrorist activity. Extradition or other administrative mechanisms of expulsion also illustrate potential disjunctions in the circle, as they may allow persons to be transferred to retentionist countries. Even though the legislative framework has significantly evolved in the last few years, the dominant role played by political evaluations creates new fissures in the abolitionist circle. Only recently have new abolitionist perspectives emerged from the ‘right of interference’ in foreign death penalty cases, which some countries try to exercise when their own nationals are involved.

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The study results indicate that when test subjects, many of whom are likely retributivists, are presented with information about the problem of innocence, the drop in support for capital punishment spans all points on the Likert scale. Our study suggests that more rigorous testing may demonstrate that an individual’s knowledge of the “innocence problem” can generate more profond changes in attitudes toward the death penalty than indicted by previous studies of the marshall Hypotheses.

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This paper has three objectives. First, it provides an analysis of the state-of-play regarding the death penalty in Asia. Second it reports on EU human rights dialogues. Third, it suggests policies that might help to support initiatives in Asian countries aimed both at restraining the use of the death penalty and securing its complete abolition.

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Essays on the theme of the issue of the DNA and the Death Penalty

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This paper discusses some case law on detention issues by the Human Rights Committee (HRC) that supervises the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), as well as HRC case law on the so-called “death row phenomenon,” which involves forcing a person to live under conditions that spawn intense fear, distress, and the virtual destruction of the personality while awaiting execution.

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FINAL DECLARATION7TH World Congress Against the Death PenaltyBrussels, 1st March 2019

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Poster of the 16th World Day against the Death Penalty dedicated to living conditions on death row. Dignity For All.

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Senate Resolution No.6 in 2011 called for a study of the contemporary capital punishment system in the Commonwealth. Pennsylvania is among the 31 states and the federal government that authorize capital punishment. During the last four decades in Pennsylvania, hundreds of murderers have been convicted and condemned to death; however, there have been only three executions.This study follows others on the same or related topics, including those conducted by the American Bar Association and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Committee on Racial and Gender Bias in the Justice System. The SR6 report is the culmination of work done by the Justice Center for Research at The Pennsylvania State University, the Interbranch Commission on Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness, and an advisory committee comprised of judges, public defenders, district attorneys, victim advocates, inmate advocates, clergy, law enforcement officials, and other expert stakeholders.

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Four-page introduction to the status of the death penalty in international human rights law and the global trend abolition.

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The authors analyze data concerning race discrimination in capital sentencing and data regarding how the public perceives this issue. They conclude that race discrimination is not an inevitable feature of all death penalty systems. Before Furman v. Georgia was decided in 1972, widespread discrimination against black defendants marred the practice of capital punishment in America. According to studies cited by the authors, race-of-defendant discrimination has lessened since Furman. However, race-of-victim discrimination remains a significant factor in sentencing; defendants with white victims are at a significantly higher risk of being sentenced to death and executed than are defendants whose victims are black, Asian, or Hispanic. From 1976 to 2002, the proportion of white-victim cases among all murder and non-negligent manslaughter cases has ranged between 51% and 56%. However, 81% of executed defendants had white victims. Polling data indicate that the general public perceives only one form of race discrimination in the use of the death penalty – race-of-defendant discrimination – and that the public and elected officials may see racial discrimination as inevitable in the criminal justice system. Race of victim discrimination is a pervasive problem in the death penalty system. However, race discrimination is not inevitable. If serious controls were enacted to address this problem (such as those imposed in a few states) a fairer system could result.

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Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of the field, Bedau addresses topics such as strong public suppport for the death penalty, wrongful convictions, the disappearance of executive clemency, constitutional arguments surronding the Eight Amendment, and procedural reforms under consideration that move toward abolition.

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The penalty follows three people caught in the crosshairs of capital punishment, and the political landscape thatcould decide their fate. Going behind the scenes of some of the biggest headlines in the history of America’sdeath penalty, the film follows the lethal injection protocol crisis that resulted in a botched execution, therehabilitation of a man who spent 15 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit, and the family of a youngwoman – brutally murdered – split by the state’s pursuit of the ultimate punishment.

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The stories of parents, siblings, children, and cousins chronicled in this book-vividly illustrate the precarious position family members of capital offenders occupy in the criminal justice system. They live in the shadow of death, crushed by trauma, grief, and helplessness. In this penetrating account of guilt and innocence, shame and triumph, devastating loss and ultimate redemption, the voices of these family members add a new dimension to debates about capital punishment and how communities can prevent and address crime.

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Veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) who have committed heinous crimes present hard cases for the American system of justice. The violence that occasionally erupts into murder can easily overcome the special respect that is afforded most veterans. However, looking away and ignoring this issue serves neither veterans nor victims. PTSD has affected an enormous number of veterans returning from combat zones. Over 800,000 Vietnam veterans suffered from PTSD. At least 175,000 veterans of Operation Desert Storm were affected by “Gulf War Illness,” which has been linked to brain cancer and other mental deficits. Over 300,000 veterans from the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts have PTSD. In one study, only about half had received treatment in the prior year.

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This survey polled public opinion in Kazakhstan towards the use of the death penalty for terrorist offences resulting in death, and also for especially grave crimes committed inwartime.

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Test your knowledge of human rights and the death penalty in the U.S. with our downloadable quiz.

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This report aims at focusing attention on the country’s use of the death penalty, particularly as Zambia does not apply international standards for fair trials in its use of the death penalty.

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Since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that executions could resume after a four year moratorium, more than 1,050 people have been executed in the United States. Approximately 3,370 men and women remain on death row throughoutthe United States. This is a teaching guide on the death penalty in the United States after 1976.

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In China last year, approximately 17 people were sentenced to death each day, every day of the year. This report examines the record versus the rhetoric in 1996. It examines the death penalty in practice during this year’s “Strike Hard Anti-Crime Campaign” which highlights legal inadequacies and institutionalized abuses long discussed by domestic critics.

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The Global Overview 2011. It provides a country-by-country analysis of the death penalty for drugs, and is intended to inform policy-makers of the potential for change as well as to shed some light on the environments in which the international fight against illicit drugs is pursued.

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This report examines four key aspects of the administration of capital punishment in Virginia: prosecutorial discretion in the charging of capital crimes, quality of legal representation for the accused at trial, appellate review of trials resulting in the death penalty and race. During its preparation, another issue became apparent: the state’s record keeping.

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This overview discusses the intersection of the law and the challenges faced by mentally ill capital defendants at every stage from trial through appeals and execution. It provides examples of some of the more famous cases of the execution of the mentally ill. Lastly, it describes current legislative efforts to exempt those who suffer from a serious mental illness from execution and the importance of such efforts.

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The authors gathered information on 1665 death-eligible cases nationwide for three years at decade intervals: 1994, 2004, and 2014. In 517 cases death sentences were imposed; in 311 cases sentences spared the defendants from death sentences, and in 837 cases prosecutors spared defendants from death sentences.

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The tide is turning in the United States from death sentences to permanent imprisonment. A growing number of states are choosing permanent imprisonment over the death penalty, fueled by growing concerns about the wrongful conviction of innocent people and the high costs of the death penalty in comparison to permanent imprisonment. In 2009, the number of new death sentences nationwide reached the lowest level since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. California lags behind in this national trend. The Golden State sent more people to death row last year than in the seven preceding years. By the close of 2009, California’s death row was the largest and most costly in the United States.

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Public support for the death penalty, which reached a four-decade low in 2016, has increased somewhat since then. Today, 54% of Americans favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, while 39% are opposed, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in April and May.

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The wrongful execution of an innocent person is an injustice that can never be rectified. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty, 139 men and women have been released from death row nationally.

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Harm Reduction International (HRI) has monitored the use of the death penalty for drug offences worldwide since our first ground-breaking publication on this issue in 2007. This report, our ninth on the subject, continues our work of providing regular updates on legislative, policy and practical developments related to the use of capital punishment for drug offences, a practice which is a clear violation of international law.

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A new book by Professor Robert Bohm of the University of Central Florida looks at death-penalty decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court prior to the modern era of capital punishment that began in 1968. In The Past As Prologue, Bohm examines 39 Court decisions, covering issues such as clemency, jury selection, coerced confessions, and effective representation.

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This submission addresses the Central African Republic’s compliance with its humanrights obligations with regard to its use of the death penalty. This submission concludesthat although the Central African Republic (CAR) should be given great credit for takingimportant steps towards abolition of the death penalty, including supporting the 2012U.N. General Assembly resolution calling for a moratorium on the death penalty, manyhurdles remain in terms of ensuring that the citizens of CAR are afforded adequatedomestic and international guarantees against the arbitrary deprivation of life.

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Many studies during the past few decades have sought to determine whether the death penalty has any deterrent effect on homicide rates. Researchers have reached widely varying, even contradictory, conclusions. Some studies have concluded that the threat of capital punishment deters murders, saving large numbers of lives; other studies have concluded that executions actually increase homicides; still others, that executions have no effect on murder rates. Commentary among researchers, advocates, and policymakers on the scientific validity of the findings has sometimes been acrimonious.

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Within the international community, other countries have recognized the potential for harm caused by our current system, and as a result have refused to extradite back to the United States individuals who might face the death penalty. These countries cite not only the possibility of execution as reason for refusal, but the waiting process which attends that death as a separate, independent violation of human rights. If we remain unpersuaded by the international community, the behavioral trends of those individuals awaiting execution are telling as well. Within one week in 2008, two individuals awaiting death in Texas committed suicide, reflecting the heightened suicide rates on death row, estimated at ten times greater than those in society at large and several times greater than those in a general prison population. In addition, the widely-recognized practice of “volunteering” for execution permits condemned inmates to waive their state and federally mandated rights to appeal in order to speed up the execution process, in essence “volunteering” to be executed.

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This paper examines Chinese students’ attitudes about the death penalty in contemporary China. Drawing upon Western public opinion research on the death penalty, samples of Chinese college students at home and abroad are used to explore the magnitude of their pro-death penalty attitudes and sources of variation in these opinions. Both groups of Chinese students are found to support the death penalty across different measures of this concept. Several individual and contextual factors are correlated with pro-death penalty attitudes, but the belief in the specific deterrent effect of punishments was the only variable that had a significant net effect on these attitudes in our multivariate analysis. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this study for future research on public opinion about crime and punishment in China.

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Although,by all functional measures, Oregonians have abandoned the death penalty, 35 condemned inmates remain on Oregon’s death row.What do we know about those people, and about the quality of justice that resulted in their death sentences? This report examines the cases of the condemned men and women in Oregon to see how they ended up there, and what patterns emerged.Here’s what we found: In Oregon, two-thirds of death row inmates possess signs of serious mental illness or intellectual impairment, endured devastatingly severe childhood trauma, or were not old enough to legally purchase alcohol at the time the offense occurred.

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The present report, the first to be submitted to the Human Rights Council, is submitted pursuant to Council resolution 16/9 and covers the human rights developments since the commencement of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on 1 August 2011.

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Poster- 18th World Day Against the Death Penalty (German)

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Detailed information on the death penalty in the Greater Caribbean

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17th World Day Against the Death Penalty Poster in German

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17th World Day Against the Death Penalty Poster in Malay

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Poster- 18th World Day Against the Death Penalty (English)

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Poster- 18th World Day Against the Death Penalty (Dhivehi)

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Poster- 18th World Day Against the Death Penalty (Cebuano)

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Poster- 18th World Day Against the Death Penalty (Italian)

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17th World Day Against the Death Penalty Poster

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17th World Day Against the Death Penalty Poster in black and white

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Poster- 18th World Day Against the Death Penalty (Tagalog)

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Poster- 18th World Day Against the Death Penalty (Japanese)

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This is the seventh edition of the Death Penalty in India: Annual Statistics Report published by Project 39A at National Law University, Delhi. 2022 represents a significant shift in death penalty adjudication, with the Supreme Court recognising the need to reconsider the capital sentencing framework for the first time since it was laid down in Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab in 1980. In a momentous order, the Supreme Court noted the gaps in the death penalty sentencing framework and has sought to address these concerns through a Constitution Bench towards establishing the components of a real, meaningful and effective capital sentencing hearing. In another decision, the Court laid down guidelines for the collection of mitigating material by trial courts. However, in the same year that the Supreme Court cast grave doubts on the death penalty sentencing framework and its implementation by trial courts, it is of concern that 165 death sentences were imposed by Sessions Courts, the highest in a single year since 2000.

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Video recording of a training session by The Advocates for Human Rights on death penalty advocacy for the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review of human rights. Download the PowerPoint presentation here.

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This short article will explore some additional issues regarding the relationship between international law and the death penalty. First, it will discuss some additional aspects of the representation of foreign nationals in capital cases. Second, it will discuss additional instances in which defense counsel can make international law arguments, regardless of the client’s nationality. Third, because international law issues are new to most lawyers in the United States, even those who are seasoned in capital litigation, it will suggest some alternative ways in which international law arguments can be made. The conclusion will put theUnited States experience with the death penalty into the broader context of world practice on the death penalty.

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The Egypt Death Penalty Index is a joint initiative of Reprieve and the Daftar Ahwal Data Research Center. The Index tracks Egypt’s use of capital punishment between 25 Janurary 2011 and 23 Septembrer 2018.

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She tells the story of two inmates she came to know as a spiritual adviser. Dobie Williams, a poor black man with an IQ of 65 from rural Louisiana, was executed after being represented by incompetent counsel and found guilty by an all-white jury based mostly on conjecture and speculation. Joseph O’Dell was convicted of murder after the court heard from an inmate who later admitted to giving false testimony for his own benefit. O’Dell received neither an evidentiary hearing nor potentially exculpatory DNA testing and was executed, insisting on his innocence the whole while. Besides exploring the shaky cases against them, Prejean describes in vivid detail the thoughts and feelings of Williams and O’Dell as their bids for clemency fail and they are put to death. The second part of the book details “the machinery of death,” the legal process that Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, dismayed at the inequities of the death penalty, cited as his reason for resigning and that current justice Antonin Scalia has boasted of being a part of.

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For two hundred years, the constitutionality of capital punishment had been axiomatic. But in 1962, Justice Arthur Goldberg and his clerk Alan Dershowitz dared to suggest otherwise, launching an underfunded band of civil rights attorneys on a quixotic crusade. In 1972, in a most unlikely victory, the Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s death penalty law in Furman v. Georgia. Though the decision had sharply divided the justices, nearly everyone, including the justices themselves, believed Furman would mean the end of executions in America.Instead, states responded with a swift and decisive showing of support for capital punishment. As anxiety about crime rose and public approval of the Supreme Court declined, the stage was set in 1976 for Gregg v. Georgia, in which the Court dramatically reversed direction.A Wild Justice is an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at the Court, the justices, and the political complexities of one of the most racially charged and morally vexing issues of our time.

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The Darkest Hour: Stories and Interviews from Death Row by Nanon M. Williams emerged from a deep and dark despair in a place where the thought of suicide often holds more appeal than the thought of living

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The International Commission against theDeath Penalty (ICDP) undertook anumber of activities in 2013 to reinforce andconsolidate the global trend toward abolition ofcapital punishment. This is a full report on ICDP’s workin 2013 as well as statistics on global trends on capital punishment.

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In 2015, America had the lowest number of executions in 25 years. Of the 28 people executed, 68% suffered from severe mental disabilities or experienced extreme childhood trauma and abuse according to a new report released by Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice. A significant number of the executed individuals had multiple mental impairments. Two individuals were executed despite doubts about their guilt.

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This report documents unfairness and unreliability that plague the death penalty system in Alabama and makes several recommendations, including a moratorium on executions. The major areas of focus the report examines are: Inadequate Defence, Prosecutorial Misconduct, Judicial Overrides, Execution of the Mentallly Retarded, Racial Discrimination, and Geographic Disparities.

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This toolkit is for the use of activists who are working on the abolition of the death penalty in West Africa. It is intended to equip activists with some key advocacy tools to effectively influence the institutions and individuals who can make abolition a reality.

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The thesis of this paper is that lawyers who have represented clients in capital murder cases at trial and appeal—not unlike all criminal trial and initial appeal counsel, but more urgently because of the circumstances—continue to owe important obligations to their former clients. These obligations have been just recently included in the latest version of the American Bar Association’s Guidelines for the Appointment and Performance of Defense Counsel in Death PenaltyCases: In accordance with professional norms, all persons who are or have been members of the defense team have a continuing duty to safeguard the interests of the client and should cooperate fully with successor counsel. This duty includes, but is not limited to: A. maintaining the records of the case in a manner that will inform successor counsel of all significant developments relevant to the litigation; B. providing the client’s files, as well as information regarding all aspects of the representation, to successor counsel; C. sharing potential further areas of legal and factual research with successor counsel; and D. cooperating with such professionally appropriate legal strategies as may be chosen by successor counsel. It is my hope that this article will demonstrate that these Guidelines reflect not just best practice, but actual ethical mandates that trial counsel, like Bryan Saunders, owe their former clients as those clients negotiate the jurisprudential maze known as habeas corpus.

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The case of Cameron Todd Willingham has become infamous and was enmeshed in the death penalty debate and the reelection of Texas Governor Rick Perry, who refused to grant a stay of execution. The governor has since attempted to derail an investigation by the Texas Forensic Science Commission.

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This report focuses itsanalysis on discrimination and torture, cruel inhuman and degrading treatment and foundnumerous human rights violations, including the most basic right – the right to life – in theuse of the death penalty in California and Louisiana.

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This paper describes the international law surrounding the trend towards abolition. It then discusses this in relation to the death penalty in Palestine which has come under criticism from Human Rights NGO’s to provide prisoners with international standards regarding their detention and providing a fair trial.

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During a televised panel discussion on the death penalty on 9th October, Slovenian law professor Dragan Petrovec said victims should play no role in the sentencing of offenders. ”The victim is never objective,” he said. ”Victims can’t be judges.” The discussion, organised by the Council of Europe to mark the European day against the death penalty, also featured Sweden’s Human Rights Ambassador Jan Axel Nordlander. Council of Europe’s Head of Department Jeroen Schokkenbroek said the organisation was critical of the United States and Japan over their use of the death penalty . He added that ”dialogue was continuing” with both countries towards ending the practice.

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The secrecy that surrounds capital punishment in Japan is taken to extremes not seen in other nations. This article describes the Japanese state’s policy of secrecy and explains how it developed in three historical stages: the “birth of secrecy” during the Meiji period (1867 – 1912); the creation and spread of “censored democracy” during the postwar Occupation (1945 – 1952); and the “acceleration of secrecy” during the decades that followed. The article then analyzes several justifications for secrecy that Japanese prosecutors provide. None seems cogent. The final section explores four meanings of the secrecy policy that relate to the sources of death penalty legitimacy, the salience of capital punishment, the nature of Japan’s democracy, and the role and rule of law in Japanese society.

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This submission addresses Iraq’s compliance with its human rights obligations withregard to its use of the death penalty. This submission concludes that Iraq cannotguarantee its citizens adequate domestic and international guarantees against the arbitrarydeprivation of life and therefore should abolish the death penalty.

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The purpose of this article is (1) to establish that increasing punitiveness characterizes criminal justice policies in Japan and (2) to explain this trend in terms of the penal populism promoted by crime victims and supporting politicians. This article first examines newspaper articles to illuminate the increasingly punitive character of recent criminal justice policies in Japan in terms of both legislation and judicial decisions. The next section discusses the main contributing factors behind this trend and its public acceptance. The next two sections discuss two related issues: the public’s subjective sense of security, and the lack of a role for empirical criminologists in criminal justice policy making in Japan. The concluding section compares the Japanese and Anglo-American situations and argues that the same penal populism seen in Anglo-American countries is rapidly rising in Japan, and that public distrust of government has ironically increased the state’s investigative, prosecutorial, and sentencing powers in Japan. This article closes with the conjecture that police, prosecutors, and judges are unlikely to relinquish their increased power in the event that they gain the public’s trust and equally unlikely in the event of a change of the ruling party.

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In the past thirty years, American attitudes towards those convicted of crimes have followed a devastating progression toward the dehumanization of criminal defendants. The evolution of law and policy has mirrored these changing attitudes. The philosophies behind incarceration have shifted from “facilitat[ing inmates’] productive re-entry back into the free world” to “using imprisonment merely to punish criminal offenders by … “containing’ them behind bars … for as long as possible.” 4 Rather than preventing crime or rehabilitating offenders, incarceration has become a means to satisfy society’s desire for vengeance and retribution. Responding to this push to punish, prosecutors in their haste to obtain a conviction are more likely to stress the heinousness of crimes rather than questioning the circumstances surrounding …

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Brandon Garrett hand-collected and analyzed national data, looking for causes and implications of this turnaround. End of Its Rope explains what he found, and why the story of who killed the death penalty, and how, can be the catalyst for criminal justice reform.

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This advocacy toolkit is for the use of activists working on the abolition of the death penalty in Africa. It is intended to equip them with some key advocacy tools to effectively influence the institutions and individuals who can make abolition a reality in the region.

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