Your search “Keep%20the%20Death%20Penalty%20Abolished%20fin%20the%20Philippfines%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20/page/cdm16501.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/criminal/id/154 ”

To assess fairness and accuracy in Ohio’s death penalty system, the Ohio Death Penalty Assessment Team researched the twelve issues that the American Bar Association identified as central to the analysis of the fairness and accuracy of a state’s capital punishment system: (1) collection, preservation, and testing of DNA and other types of evidence; (2) law enforcement identifications and interrogations; (3) crime laboratories and medical examiner offices; (4) prosecutorial professionalism; (5) defense services; (6) the direct appeal process; (7) state post-conviction proceedings; (8) clemency; (9) jury instructions; (10) judicial independence; (11) racial and ethnic minorities; and (12) mental retardation and mental illness. The Ohio Death Penalty Assessment Report devotes a chapter to each of these issues, which follow a preliminary chapter on Ohio death penalty law (for a total of 13 chapters). Each of the issue chapters begins with a discussion of the relevant law and then reaches conclusions about the extent to which the State of Ohio complies with the ABA Recommendations.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Due Process ,

To assess fairness and accuracy in Pennsylvania’s death penalty system, the Pennsylvania Death Penalty Assessment Team researched the twelve issues that the American Bar Association identified as central to the analysis of the fairness and accuracy of a state’scapital punishment system: (1) collection, preservation, and testing of DNA and other types of evidence; (2) law enforcement identifications and interrogations; (3) crime laboratories and medical examiner offices; (4) prosecutorial professionalism; (5) defense services; (6) the direct appeal process; (7) state post-conviction proceedings; (8) clemency; (9) jury instructions; (10) judicial independence; (11) racial and ethnic minorities; and (12) mental retardation and mental illness. Following a preliminary chapter on Pennsylvania’s death penalty law, the Pennsylvania Death Penalty Assessment Report devotes a chapter to each of these issues. Each chapter begins with a discussion of the relevant law and concludes with a discussion of the extent to which the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is in compliance with the ABA’s Recommendations.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Due Process ,

To assess fairness and accuracy in Tennessee’s death penalty system, the Tennessee Death Penalty Assessment Team researched the twelve issues that the American Bar Association identified as central to the analysis of the fairness and accuracy of a state’s capital punishment system: (1) collection, preservation, and testing of DNA and other types of evidence; (2) law enforcement identifications and interrogations; (3) crime laboratories and medical examiner offices; (4) prosecutorial professionalism; (5) defense services; (6) the direct appeal process; (7) state post-conviction proceedings; (8) clemency proceedings; (9) jury instructions; (10) judicial independence; (11) racial and ethnic minorities; and (12) mental retardation and mental illness. Following a preliminary chapter on Tennessee’s death penalty law, the Tennessee Death Penalty Assessment Report devotes a chapter to each of these twelve issues. Each chapter begins with a discussion of the relevant law and then concludes the extent to which the State of Tennessee is in compliance with the ABA’s Recommendations.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Due Process ,

The regional seminar on the abolition of the death penalty in West Africa took place inDakar (Senegal) from 12-14 November 2012. This workshop brought together nineteenACAT members affiliated to FIACAT. It was therefore possible for each of the nine West Afri-can ACATs1to be represented by two participants (with the exception of Senegal, whichwas represented by three members).Participants at the workshop attended lectures and had the opportunity to developnational action plans for achieving abolition in their countries. According to feedbackreceived at the end of the seminar, attendees found the practical nature of the lectures,and the opportunity to network with other ACATs and learn from the experiences of otherparticipants, particularly beneficial.This document is a collection of all of the lectures from the Dakar seminar, as well asinternational and African texts relating to the death penalty. It is intended as a practicaltool to assist us as we progress towards abolition in Sub-Saharan Africa.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Trend Towards Abolition, Member organizations, Country/Regional profiles,

To assess fairness and accuracy in Indiana’s death penalty system, the Indiana Death Penalty Assessment Team researched the twelve issues that the American Bar Association identified as central to the analysis of the fairness and accuracy of a state’s capital punishment system: (1) collection, preservation, and testing of DNA and other types of evidence; (2) law enforcement identifications and interrogations; (3) crime laboratories and medical examiner offices; (4) prosecutorial professionalism; (5) defense services; (6) the direct appeal process; (7) state post-conviction proceedings; (8) clemency; (9) jury instructions; (10) judicial independence; (11) racial and ethnic minorities; and (12) mental retardation and mental illness. The Indiana Death Penalty Assessment Report devotes a chapter to each of these issues, which follow a preliminary chapter on Indiana death penalty law (for a total of 13 chapters). Each of the issue chapters begins with a discussion of the relevant law and then reaches conclusions about the extent to which the State of Indiana complies with the ABA Recommendations.

• Document type NGO report

Published on December 18, 2023.

Initial impressions of others based on facial appearances are often inaccurate yet can lead to dire outcomes. Across four studies, adult participants underwent a counterstereotype training to reduce their reliance on facial appearance in consequential social judgments of White male faces. In Studies 1 and 2, trustworthiness and sentencing judgments among control participants predicted whether real-world inmates were sentenced to death versus life in prison, but these relationships were diminished among trained participants. In Study 3, a sequential priming paradigm demonstrated that the training was able to abolish the relationship between even automatically and implicitly perceived trustworthiness and the inmates’ life-or-death sentences. Study 4 extended these results to realistic decision-making, showing that training reduced the impact of facial trustworthiness on sentencing decisions even in the presence of decision-relevant information. Overall, our findings suggest that a counterstereotype intervention can mitigate the potentially harmful effects of relying on facial appearance in consequential social judgments.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States

It is of the utmost importance, in the short and medium-term, to develop an intense work of academically nature both of study and disclosure of the problems of the abolition of the death penalty in the international scenario, to complement and help the work of the diplomatic action and non-governmental organizations. To this effect it is proposed to keep REPECAP as an ever – growing scientific world network comprising academic law scholars, human rights centers, institutions of public law and Ngos, with expertise and skill in the problems of death penalty and interests in the field of international criminal justice, as well as young researchers who have been dealing with these topics or wish to get involved with the subject, regardless of nationality or locations.

• Document type Working with...
• Themes list Networks,

All the Council of Europe documents related to abolition of the death penalty gathered in one page : decisions of the Committee of Ministers, resolutions of the Parliamentary Assembly, Treaties…

• Document type Regional body report
• Themes list Trend Towards Abolition
• Available languages Instruments juridiques clés et textes adoptés sur l'abolition de la peine de mort par le Conseil de l'Europe

8 Myths about the death penalty are explored in this text: 1. the death penalty is needed to keep society safe, 2. the death penalty is applied fairly, 3. the death penalty is used worldwide, 4. the death penalty deters crime, 5. execution is cheaper than permanent imprisonment, 6. the death penalty offers justice to victims’ families, 7. only the truly guilty get the death penalty, 8. religious teachings support the death penalty.

• Document type Arguments against the death penalty
• Themes list Networks,
• Available languages Mitos y Realidades de la Pena de Muerte

Isolation and Desolation – Conditions of Detention of People Sentenced to Death in Malaysia is the first ever fact-finding mission report on the conditions of detention of death row prisoners in Malaysia.

It examines the use of death penalty in Malaysia as well as the actual situation of people on death row.

This report is not meant to point fingers but rather to put the facts on the table in a transparent manner and work from there. It is mainly an advocacy tool for all abolitionist stakeholders, from civil society actors to the parliamentarians who will keep fighting for the abolition of the death penalty.

—————————————
Isolation and Desolation – Conditions of Detention of People Sentenced to Death di Malaysia adalah satu-satunya laporan berasaskan misi mengkaji fakta (fact-finding mission) mengenai keadaan-keadaan penahanan bagi banduan-banduan hukuman mati di Malaysia.

Laporan ini mengkaji pelaksanaan hukuman mati di Malaysia dan juga keadaan sebenar orang-orang yang dijatuhkan hukuman mati.

Laporan ini bukan bertujuan untuk menunding jari terhadap mana-mana pihak, tetapi bertujuan untuk memberi pencerahan kepada fakta-fakta yang ditemui dan berusaha ke atasnya. Laporan ini bertujuan utama sebagai alat advokasi kepada semua pihak yang mempunyai kepentingan dalam pemansuhan, bermula dari ahli persatuan kemasyarakatan sehingga ahli parlimen yang akan berusaha berterusan untuk memansuhkan hukuman mati.

• Document type NGO report
• Countries list Malaysia
• Themes list Death Row Conditions 

In 1998 Richard A. Leo and Richard J. Ofshe published a study of false confession cases entitled, The Consequences of False Confessions: Deprivations of Liberty and Miscarriages of Justice in the Age of Psychological Interrogation, which drew a response from Paul Cassell (1999), The Guilty and the Innocent : An Examination of Alleged Cases of Wrongful Conviction from False Confessions. In this article, the authors demonstrate that Cassell s article misreports the research and analysis contained in Leo and Ofshes 1998 article, and that Cassell s attempt to challenge Leo and Ofshes classifications of nine out of sixty false confessions is erroneous because Cassell excludes or presents an incomplete picture of important facts in his case summaries, selectively ignores enormous inconsistencies, implausibilities and/or contradictions in the prosecution s cases, and fails to acknowledge the existence of substantial exculpatory, if not dispositive, evidence. To illustrate the problems and biases in Cassell s commentary, this article discusses at length one of Cassell s challenges, the Barry Lee Fairchild case, in the main body of the article and in a detailed appendix analyzes the eight other cases (Joseph Giarratano, Paul Ingram, Richard Lapointe, Jessie Misskelley, Bradley Page, James Harry Reyos, Linda Stangel, and Martin Tankleff). Leo and Ofshe provide a point by point refutation of Cassell s assertions in all nine cases, demonstrating that all nine individuals were, as originally classified, almost certainly innocent of the crimes to which they had confessed.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

An argument against deterrence is made by looking at a survey which found that during the last 20 years, the homicide rate in states with the death penalty has been 48 to 101 percent higher than in states without the death penalty.

• Document type Arguments against the death penalty
• Themes list Deterrence ,

This sheet details the factors which contribute to the arbitrariness of the death penalty in the USA.

• Document type Arguments against the death penalty
• Themes list Arbitrariness,

As the number of post-conviction DNA exonerations mounted and the Innocence Project undertook to treat these exonerations as a data set indicating the principal causes of wrongful conviction, the absence of fingerprint cases in that data set could have been interpreted as soft evidence that latent print evidence was unlikely to contribute to wrongful convictions. That situation changed in 2004 when Stephan Cowans became the first – and thus far the only – person to be exonerated by DNA evidence for a wrongful conviction in which fingerprint evidence was a contributing factor. Cowans’s wrongful conviction in Boston in 1997 for the attempted murder of a police officer was based almost solely on eyewitness identification and latent print evidence. The Cowans case not only provided dramatic additional support for the already established proposition that wrongful conviction by fingerprint was possible, it also demonstrated why the exposure of such cases, when they do occur, is exceedingly unlikely. These points have already been made in a comprehensive 2005 study of exposed cases of latent print misattributions. In this article, I discuss some additional things that we have learned about the prevalence and potential causes of wrongful conviction by fingerprint in the short time since the publication of that study.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence,

This is Issue #77, the final issue of these periodic reports, having first been launched on June 15, 1984. On that date, the death penalty for juvenile offenders (defined as those under age 18 at the time of their crimes) was an obscure issue in law as well as in political and social arenas. During the last twenty-one years, these reports have been with us (1) through the intense litigation of the late 1980s, (2) through our society’s near hysteria about violent juvenile crime in the 1990s, (3) into the era of the international pressure on the United States to abandon this practice, and (4) now at the end of this practice. The validity and influence of these reports is indicated by thecitations to them in the opinions of leading courts, including the United States Supreme Court: Roper v. Simmons, 125 S.Ct. 1183, 1192, 1193, 1210, 1211, 1221 (2005); In re Stanford, 537 U.S. 968, 971 (2002); and Stanford v. Kentucky, 492 U.S. 361, 373 (1989). In the litigation leading up to the final juvenile death penalty case before the United States Supreme Court (Roper v. Simmons, 125 S.Ct. 1183 (2005)), the Missouri Supreme Court majority opinion included 12 citations to these reports: See Simmons v. Roper, 112 S.W.3d 397, 408, 409, 411 (Mo. 2003). This final issue of this periodic report is intended to document the status of the death penalty for juvenile offenders as ofthe day before the United States Supreme Court held this practice to be unconstitutional. These reports sketch the characteristics of the juvenile offenders and their crimes who have been sentenced to death, who have been executed, and who are currently under death sentences. —- See bottom left hand corner of web page.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Juveniles,

This 65-page report reveals the slipshod history of executions by lethal injection, using a protocol created three decades ago with no scientific research, nor modern adaptation, and still unchanged today. As the prisoner lies strapped to a gurney, a series of three drugs is injected into his vein by executioners hidden behind a wall. A massive dose of sodium thiopental, an anesthetic, is injected first, followed by pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes voluntary muscles, but leaves the prisoner fully conscious and able to experience pain. A third drug, potassium chloride, quickly causes cardiac arrest, but the drug is so painful that veterinarian guidelines prohibit its use unless a veterinarian first ensures that the pet to be put down is deeply unconscious. No such precaution is taken for prisoners being executed.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Lethal Injection,

In this 20-page report, Human Rights Watch documents failures in law and practice that since January 2005 have resulted in 32 executions of juvenile offenders in five countries: Iran (26), Saudi Arabia (2), Sudan (2), Pakistan (1), and Yemen (1). The report also highlights cases of individuals recently executed or facing execution in the five countries, where well over 100 juvenile offenders are currently on death row, awaiting the outcome of a judicial appeal, or in some murder cases, the outcome of negotiations for pardons in exchange for financial compensation

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Juveniles,
• Available languages آخر المعاقلالقضاء على عقوبة إعدام الأحداث في إيران والمملكة العربيةالسعودية والسودان وباآستان واليمن

• Document type World Coalition

From initial charging decisions to plea bargaining to jury sentencing, African-Americans are treated more harshly when they are defendants, and their lives are accorded less value when they are victims.

• Document type Arguments against the death penalty
• Themes list Discrimination,
• Available languages La Pena de Muerte tiene Tendencias Racistas

This factsheet deals with the cost of the death penalty in the United States using figures from a study conducted by the Californian Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice.

• Document type Arguments against the death penalty
• Themes list Networks, Financial cost,
• Available languages La Pena de Muerte Cuesta Más

The execution of those with mental illness or “the insane” is clearly prohibited by international law. Virtually every country in the world prohibits the execution of people with mental illness. This webpage explores international law and the death penalty in relation to the USA.

• Document type Arguments against the death penalty
• Themes list Mental Illness,
• Available languages La Pena de Muerte ignora las Enfermedades Mentales

The 30-page report found that at least 22 individuals have been sentenced to death in Yemen despite evidence that they were under age 18 at the time of their alleged crimes. In the last five years, Yemen has executed at least 15 young men and women who said they were under 18 at the time of their offense.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Juveniles, Country/Regional profiles,
• Available languages "انظروا إلينا بعين الرحمة" الأحداث على ذمة الإعدام في اليمن

The report “Sentenced to oblivion. Fact-finding mission on death row. Cameroon”, which was officially launched on 21 June at the Delegation of the European Union from Yaoundé to Cameroon, is the result of an unprecedented fact-finding mission, conducted from May to October 2018 in five Cameroonian prisons by the Cameroonian Lawyers’ Network against the Death Penalty (Racopem) and the association ECPM (Ensemble contre la peine de mort).

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Death Row Conditions, Country/Regional profiles,
• Available languages Condamnés à l'oubli. Mission d'enquête dans les couloirs de la mort. Cameroun

NKDB hosts a monthly English language briefing and discussion on North Korean human rights every month with embassy officials, NGO staff, and NKDB staff as guests

• Document type Article
• Countries list Republic of Korea
• Themes list World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, Death Penalty, Country/Regional profiles,

The objective of this initiative was to use “the product of art” as a vehicle to educate common people about the history and practice of capital punishment in America and to lift societies consciousness around the idea of endowing a National Death Penalty Museum to preserve its deep history.

• Document type Working with...
• Themes list Public debate,

The Dui Hua Foundation estimates that China executed approximately 2,400 people in 2013 and will execute roughly the same number of people in 2014. Annual declines in executions recorded in recent years are likely to be offset in 2014 by the use of capital punishment in anti-terrorism campaigns in Xinjiang and the anti-corruption campaign nationwide.

• Document type Article
• Countries list China
• Themes list Statistics,

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

• Document type Campaigning
• Themes list International law, Trend Towards Abolition,

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

• Document type Campaigning
• Themes list Public opinion,

New information on foreign nationals facing the death penalty in the U.S. is now available through Mark Warren of Human Rights Research. This DPIC page includes information on 143 foreign citizens from 37 countries on state and federal death rows.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Country/Regional profiles,

Campaigning toolkit published by Amnesty International. A 16-page detailed advocacy document explaining why the abolition of the death penalty is necessary and how the theories behind capital punishment get it wrong.

• Document type Campaigning
• Themes list Networks,
• Available languages Korean : 사형제도 극단적 형벌La Peine de Mort: Le Châtiment SuprêmeLa Pena de Muerte: El Castigo Máximp

This sheet speaks about the trend towards abolition of the death penalty, aswell as declining public support for it.

• Document type Arguments against the death penalty
• Themes list Trend Towards Abolition,

This webpage talks about innocence and the death penalty: Examples of innocence in three cases in the United States and factors leading to wrongful conviction.

• Document type Arguments against the death penalty
• Themes list Innocence,

In recent years, a growing number of religious organizations have participated in the nation’s death penalty debate. The purpose of this Web page is to provide access to information regarding the efforts of these faith groups and to highlight recent developments related to religion and the death penalty.

• Document type Arguments against the death penalty
• Themes list Religion ,

This article examines, from a legal perspective, why executions in Taiwan declined from 78 in 1990 to zero in 2006. The inquiry focuses on three considerations: the number of laws that authorized employment of the death penalty; the code of criminal procedure; and the manner in which executions were carried out, including the manner in which amnesty was granted. The article argues that the ratification of international covenants and constitutional interpretations did not play a significant role in the decline, and that several factors that did play a role included the annulment or amendment of laws, changes in criminal procedure, establishment of and further amendments to guidelines for execution and two laws for reducing sentences. This article maintains that the absence of executions in 2006 is a unique situation that will not last because some inmates remain on death row, meaning that executions in Taiwan will continue unless the death penalty is abolished. However, the article concludes that the guarantee of the utmost human right, the right to life, can be sustained in Taiwan through the demands of democratic majority rule.

• Document type Article
• Countries list Taiwan
• Themes list Networks,

Has the imposition of death improved our stance in this battle for security of our fellow man? Does it have a “sting” in the sense of deterring man from killing men, women and children? Has society been victorious in preventing the killing? The simple answer is that the death penalty in America has done little to deter or prevent those inclined to kill from killing. Another concern is whether our system has terminated the lives of innocent individuals. 3 Under these circumstances, what should we as a society do insofar as our criminal justice system is concerned? In this article I seek to address those questions and ultimately recommend an overhaul in our death penalty approach. Is it time to …

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

To a great extent, those who believe that our criminal justice system rarely convicts the factually innocent and those who believe such miscarriages are rife have generally talked past each other for want of any empirically-justified factual innocence wrongful conviction rate. This article remedies at least a part of this problem by establishing the first such empirically justified wrongful conviction rate ever for a significant universe of real world serious crimes: capital rape-murders in the 1980’s. Using DNA exonerations for capital rape-murders from 1982 through 1989 as a numerator, and a 406-member sample of the 2235 capital sentences imposed during this period, this article shows that 21.45%, or around 479 of those, were cases of capital rape murder. Data supplied by the Innocence Project of Cardozo Law School and newly developed for this article show that only 67% of those cases would be expected to yield usable DNA for analysis. Combining these figures and dividing the numerator by the resulting denominator, a minimum factually wrongful conviction rate for capital rape-murder in the 1980’s emerges: 3.3%. The article goes on to consider the likely ceiling accompanying this 3.3% floor, arriving at a slightly softer number for the maximum factual error rate of around 5%. The article then goes on to analyze the implications of a factual error rate of 3.3%-5% for both those who currently claim errors are extremely rare, and those who claim they are extremely common. Extension of the 3.3%-5% to other capital and non-capital categories of crime is discussed, and standards of moral duty to support system reform in the light of such error rates is considered at length.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence,

A recent cohort of studies report deterrent effects of capital punishment that substantially exceed almost all previous estimates of lives saved by execution. Some of the new studies go further to claim that pardons, commutations, and exonerations cause murders to increase, as does trial delay. This putative life-life tradeoff is the basis for claims by legal academics and advocates of a moral imperative to aggressively prosecute capital crimes, brushing off evidentiary doubts as unreasonable cautions that place potential beneficiaries at risk of severe harm. Challenges to this “new deterrence” literature find that the evidence is too unstable and unreliable to support policy choices on capital punishment. This article identifies numerous technical and conceptual errors in the “new deterrence” studies that further erode their reliability: inappropriate methods of statistical analysis, failures to consider several factors such as drug epidemics that drive murder rates, missing data on key variables in key states, the tyranny of a few outlier states and years, weak to non-existent tests of concurrent effects of incarceration, inadequate instruments to disentangle statistical confounding of murder rates with death sentences and other punishments, failure to consider the general performance of the criminal justice system as a competing deterrent, artifactual results from truncated time frames, and the absence of any direct test of the components of contemporary theoretical constructions of deterrence. Re-analysis of one of the data sets shows that even simple adjustments to the data produce contradictory results, while alternate statistical methods produce contrary estimates. But the central mistake in this enterprise is one of causal reasoning: the attempt to draw causal inferences from a flawed and limited set of observational data, the absence of direct tests of the moving parts of the deterrence story, and the failure to address important competing influences on murder. There is no reliable, scientifically sound evidence that pits execution against a robust set of competing explanations to identify whether it exerts a deterrent effect that is uniquely and sufficiently powerful to overwhelm the recurring epidemic cycles of murder. This and other rebukes remind us to invoke tough, neutral social science standards and commonsense causal reasoning before expanding the use of execution with its attendant risks and costs.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Deterrence ,

The attitude of international law and practice to supreme penalties has evolved enormously over the past half-century. At Nuremberg, in 1946, capital punishment was imposed upon Nazi war criminals. But at the Rome Conference in 1998, when the international community provided for the establishment of the International Criminal Court, not only was capital punishment excluded, the text also limited the scope of life imprisonment. These changes were driven principally by evolving norms of international human rights law. The first changes became apparent in the early work of the International Law Commission on the Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind, during the 1950s. When criminal prosecution returned to the international agenda, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was widespread agreement to exclude capital punishment. But at the Rome Conference, a relatively small and geographically isolated group of States made an aggressive attempt to defend capital punishment. Ultimately unsuccessful, their efforts only drew attention to a growing rejection of both capital punishment and life imprisonment in international and national legal systems

• Document type Article
• Themes list Networks,

This article examines the potential impact of the new lay assessor system, or saiban-in seido, on capital punishment in Japan, and considers whether it may reduce death sentences to the point of effectively abolishing them at trial stage in the District Court. The article posits that the introduction of the lay assessor system may create the momentum for Japan to align its criminal justice system with that of other developed countries—that is, abolition of the death penalty as an available criminal sanction.

• Document type Article
• Countries list Japan
• Themes list Networks,

Chivalry – that set of values and code of conduct for the medieval knightly class – has long influenced American law, from Supreme Court decisions to substantive criminal law doctrines and the administration of criminal justice. The chivalrous knight was enjoined to seek honor and defend it through violence and, in a society which enforced strict gender roles, to show gallantry toward “ladies” of the same class, except for the women of the knight’s own household, over whom he exercised complete authority. This article explores, for the first time, whether these chivalric values might explain sentencing outcomes in capital cases. The data for the article comes from our original study of 1299 first degree murder cases in California, whose death penalty scheme accords prosecutors and juries virtually unlimited discretion in making the death-selection decision. We examine sentencing outcomes for three particular types of murder where a “chivalry effect” might be expected – gang murders, rape murders and domestic violence murders. In cases involving single victims, the results were striking. In gang murders, the death sentence rate was less than one-tenth the overall death sentence rate. By contrast, in rape murder cases, the death sentence rate was nine times the overall death sentence rate. The death sentence rate for single-victim domestic violence murders was roughly 25% lower than the overall death sentence rate. We also examined, through this study and earlier California studies, more general data on gender disparities in death sentencing and found substantial gender-of-defendant and gender-of-victim disparities. Women guilty of capital murder are far less likely than men to be sentenced to death, and defendants who kill women are far more likely to be sentenced to death than defendants who kill men. We argue that all of these findings are consistent with chivalric norms, and we conclude that, in the prosecutors’ decisions to seek death and juries’ decisions to impose it, chivalry appears to be alive and well.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Women,

The People’s Republic of China no doubt leads the world in both numbers of death sentences and executions. Despite being the largest user of the death penalty, China has never conducted a national poll on citizens’ opinions toward capital punishment, while claiming “overwhelming public support” as a major justification for its retention and use. Based on a content analysis of 38,512 comments collected from 63 cases in 2015, this study examines the diversity and rationales of netizens’ opinions of and interactions with China’s criminal justice system. In addition, the book discusses China’s social, systemic, and structural problems and critically examines the rationality of netizens’ opinions based on Habermas’s communicative rationality framework. Readers will be able to contextualize Chinese netizens’ discussions and draw conclusions about commonalities and uniqueness of China’s death penalty practice.

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list China
• Themes list Public Opinion 

Bryan Stevenson discusses criminal justice in the United States. He discusses the influence of race in the outcome of criminal justice cases and uses social statistics to give the listeners a broader view of why the US state prisons are comprised of more of one race or another. Between chapter 4 and 8 Stevenson discusses the seemingly inherent racial bias to the administration of capital punishment in the United States.

• Document type Arguments against the death penalty
• Themes list Minorities, Discrimination,

We assessed the Court’s reformist project on its own terms, asking whether the Court achieved the goals explicit or tolerated, if not invited, the inequalities and capriciousness characteristic of the pre-Furman era. We also argued that, apart from its failure on its own terms, the Supreme Court’s reformist regulation of capital punishment might well have carried an additional unanticipated cost. Whereas abolitionists initially sought judicial regulation of the death penalty as at least a first step towards abolition, judicial reform actually may have helped to stabilize the death penalty as a social practice. We argued that the appearance of intensive regulation of state death penalty practices, notwithstanding its virtual absence, played a role in legitimizing the practice of capital punishment in the eyes of actors both within and outside the criminal justice system, and we pointed to some objective indicators—such as the dramatic decline in the use of executive clemency in the post-Furman era[12] —as support for this thesis. Implicit in Furman and the 1976 foundational cases. Our assessment was not a positive one. Although the reformist approach spawned an extraordinarily intricate and detailed capital punishment jurisprudence, the resulting doctrines were in practical terms largely unresponsive to the underlying concerns for fairness and heightened reliability that had first led to the constitutional regulation of the death penalty. We described contemporary capital punishment law as the worst of all possible worlds. Its sheer complexity led to numerous reversals of death sentences and thus imposed substantial costs on state criminal justice systems. On closer inspection, however, the complexity concealed the minimalist nature of the Court’s reforms.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

This report has been prepared for Governor Ryan’s Commission on Capital Punishment to provide additional information on those who have been wrongfully convicted of murder and subsequently incarcerated. It is hoped that this information is useful in the Commission’s consideration of possible improvements in the way criminal justice agencies and allied entities meet the needs of those who have been wrongfully convicted.

• Document type Working with...
• Themes list Networks,

Each wrongful conviction signifies an acute failure of the criminal justice system, a loss of innocence for those of us who want to believe in its merits, each exoneration constitutes an affirmation of the system’s potential value – not so much in the sense that the post-conviction system “works” (given that it often does not) but that learning about the uniquely human details of individual exonerations serves as a powerful motivating force to revamp the process through which guilt or innocence is adjudicated. Our criminal justice system is changeable, its flaws possibly remediable, and it is this prospect of a revised, superior method of charging and trying those accused of crimes.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Due Process , Innocence,

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 …

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

The Center on Wrongful Convictions is dedicated to identifying and rectifying wrongful convictions and other serious miscarriages of justice. The Center has three components: representation, research, and community services. Center faculty, staff, cooperating outside attorneys, and Bluhm Legal Clinic students investigate possible wrongful convictions and represent imprisoned clients with claims of actual innocence. The research component focuses on identifying systemic problems in the criminal justice system and, together with the community services component, on developing initiatives designed to raise public awareness of the prevalence, causes, and social costs of wrongful convictions and promote reform of the criminal justice system. In addition, the community services component helps exonerated former prisoners cope with the difficult process of reintegration into free society.

• Document type Working with...
• Themes list Networks,

This paper seeks first to show that persons who are convicted of crimes can be perceived as either remorseful or as lacking in remorse. This division establishes a moral hierarchy that has profound implications for the characterization and disposition of persons who are so designated. Second, using both Canadian and American cases, it looks at how inclusion in the category of the unremorseful affects the characterization and disposition of those who have been wrongfully convicted. Finally, it suggests that remorse is a major site of conflict between persons who are wrongfully convicted and officials within the criminal justice system, conflict that involves the use of institutional pressure to encourage the expression of remorse, on the one hand, and the mobilization of individual resources to resist those expressions.

• Document type Article
• Countries list Canada
• Themes list Networks,

The news about the astounding accuracy of felony convictions in the United States, delivered by Justice Scalia and Joshua Marquis in the passage set out epigrammatically above, would be cause for rejoicing if it were true. Imagine. Only 27 factually wrong felony convictions out of every 100,000! Unfortunately, it is not true, as the empirical data analyzed in this article demonstrates. To a great extent, those who believe that our criminal justice system rarely convicts the factually innocent and those who believe such miscarriages are rife have generally talked past each other for want of any empirically-justified factual innocence wrongful conviction rate. This article remedies at least a part of this problem by establishing the first such empirically justified wrongful conviction rate ever for a significant universe of real world serious crimes: capital rape-murders in the 1980’s. Using DNA exonerations for capital rape-murders from 1982 through 1989 as a numerator, and a 406-member sample of the 2235 capital sentences imposed during this period, this article shows that 21.45%, or around 479 of those, were cases of capital rape murder. Data supplied by the Innocence Project of Cardozo Law School and newly developed for this article show that only 67% of those cases would be expected to yield usable DNA for analysis. Combining these figures and dividing the numerator by the resulting denominator, a minimum factually wrongful conviction rate for capital rape-murder in the 1980’s emerges: 3.3%. The article goes on to consider the likely ceiling accompanying this 3.3% floor, arriving at a slightly softer number for the maximum factual error rate of around 5%. The article then goes on to analyze the implications of a factual error rate of 3.3%-5% for both those who currently claim errors are extremely rare, and those who claim they are extremely common. Extension of the 3.3%-5% to other capital and non-capital categories of crime is discussed, and standards of moral duty to support system reform in the light of such error rates is considered at length.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

The aim of this study was to explore the opinions of former judges of the Supreme Court of India on the death penalty and more generally on the state of India’s criminal justice system as far as it was relevant to the death penalty. The study did not focus on the position that former judges took on the death penalty but was instead interested in understanding the reasons they saw for both abolition and retention. In addition to exploring those reasons, the study also wanted to map the understanding of the ‘rarest of rare’ doctrine among former judges and get insights into the manner in which judicial discretion is exercised in death penalty cases. Finally, we wanted to locate all these discussions on the death penalty in the context of an evaluation of the criminal justice system by the former judges.

• Document type Academic report
• Themes list Networks, Death Penalty, Country/Regional profiles,

Em decorrência de certos crimes de grande repercussão que abalam a sociedade e da impotência do Estado frente à criminalidade, ressuscitam vozes e projetos solicitando a aplicação da pena de morte entre nós. O tema é de abordagem complexa, polêmica e controversa.Os partidários da supressão do homem sustentam que a presença da pena de morte na legislação teria por escopo de definitivamente banir ou diminuir o crescente índice de criminalidade em nosso país, além de desestimular homicídios, latrocínios, crimes sexuais violentos, seqüestros etc.Mas será que a pena de morte, como têm sido defendido por alguns setores da sociedade, seria a solução para os problemas de violência e da criminalidade, que estão sendo vivenciadas pela população brasileira?

• Document type Article
• Countries list Brazil
• Themes list Networks,

In the first part of this paper we address the problems inherent in studying wrongful convictions: our pervasive ignorance and the extreme difficulty of obtaining the data that we need to answer even basic questions. The main reason that we know so little about false convictions is that, by definition, they are hidden from view. As a result, it is nearly impossible to gather reliable data on the characteristics or even the frequency of false convictions. In addition, we have very limited data on criminal investigations and prosecutions in general, so even if we could somehow obtain data on cases of wrongful conviction, we would have inadequate data on true convictions to compare them to. In the second part we dispel some of that ignorance by considering data on false convictions in a small but important subset of criminal cases about which we have unusually detailed information: death sentences. From 1973 on we know basic facts about all defendants who were sentenced to death in the United States, and we know which of them were exonerated. From these data we estimate that the frequency of wrongful death sentences in the United States is at least 2.3%. In addition, we compare post-1973 capital exonerations in the United States to a random sample of cases of defendants who were sentenced in the same time period and ultimately executed. Based on these comparisons we present a handful of findings on features of the investigations of capital cases, and on background facts about capital defendants, that are modest predictors of false convictions.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence,

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.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Legal Representation,

The past several decades have seen the emergence of a movement in the criminal justice system that has called for a greater consideration for the rights of victims. One manifestation of this movement has been the “right” of victims or victims’ families to speak to the sentencing body through what are called victim impact statements about the value of the victim and the full harm that the offender has created. Although victim impact statements have been a relatively noncontroversial part of regular criminal trials, their presence in capital cases has had a more contentious history. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned previous decisions and explicitly permitted victim impact testimony in capital cases in Payne v. Tennessee (1991). The dissenters in that case argued that such evidence only would arouse the emotions of jurors and bias them in favor of imposing death. A body of research in behavioral economics on the “identifiable victim effect” and the “identifiable wrongdoer effect” would have supported such a view. Using a randomized controlled experiment with a death-eligible sample of potential jurors and the videotape of an actual penalty trial in which victim impact evidence (VIE) was used, we found that these concerns about VIE are perhaps well placed. Subjects who viewed VIE testimony in the penalty phase were more likely to feel negative emotions like anger, hostility, and vengeance; were more likely to feel sympathy and empathy toward the victim; and were more likely to have favorable perceptions of the victim and victim’s family as well as unfavorable perceptions of the offender. We found that these positive feelings toward the victim and family were in turn related to a heightened risk of them imposing the death penalty. We found evidence that part of the effect of VIE on the decision to impose death was mediated by emotions of sympathy and empathy. We think our findings open the door for future work to put together better the causal story that links VIE to an increased inclination to impose death as well as explore possible remedies.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Murder Victims' Families,

Evidence indicates that the conviction and imprisonment of factually innocent persons occur with some regularity. Most research focuses on causes, but the incidence of wrongful convictions is an important scientific and policy issue, especially as no official body gathers data on miscarriages of justice. Two methods are available for discovering the incidence of wrongful conviction: (1) enumerating specific cases and (2) having criminal justice experts estimate its incidence. Counts or catalogues of wrongful conviction necessarily undercount its incidence and are subject to accuracy challenges. We surveyed Michigan criminal justice officials, replicating a recent Ohio survey, to obtain an expert estimate of the incidence of wrongful conviction. All groups combined estimated that wrongful convictions occurred at a rate of less than 1/2 percent in their own jurisdiction and at a rate of 1-3 percent in the United States. Defense lawyers estimate higher rates of wrongful conviction than judges, who estimate higher rates than police officials and prosecutors. These differences may be explained by professional socialization. An overall wrongful conviction estimate of 1/2 percent extrapolates to about 5,000 wrongful felony convictions and the imprisonment of more than 2,000 innocent persons in the United States every year.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence,

An investigation into the death penalty in the People’s Republic of China in the Xi Jinping era (2012–) shows that unlike previous administrations, Xi does not appear to have articulated a signature death penalty policy. Where policy in China is unclear, assessing both the quality and frequency of discourse on the topic can provide evidence regarding an administration’s priorities.
This article was first published in Crime Justice Journal: https://www.crimejusticejournal.com/issue/view/119

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list China

The general feeling of NGOs and abolitionists in Uganda is that the most pressing issue is the situation of ordinary prisoners, while the death penalty as administered by the military should be addressed at a second stage. The questions relating to the military are sensitive issues in Uganda, which might also explain that position. The focus of the present report is consequently mainly on the death sentences pronounced by ordinary criminal courts.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Country/Regional profiles,

Blind Justice is a report which focuses on the problems of the death penalty from the perspective of jurors. While jurors have always occupied an esteemed position in the broader criminal justice system in the United States, in capital cases the responsibility of jurors is even more critical as they decide whether defendants should live or die. Even with this unique authority in capital cases, they are treated less than respectfully. Frequently, they are kept in the dark regarding key information about the case and are often barred from serving based on their beliefs or their race.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Networks,

The recent extension in parts of Nigeria of the death penalty to areas many consider to be private aspects of life has focused the debate on both the appropriateness of the death penalty in general and on the use of the criminal justice system as a way to regulate sexual behaviour. Amnesty International Believes that the death penalty in its application in Nigeria in particular violates women’’s human rights to access to justice, according to international human rights law and standards, and has a discriminatory effect on women in certain cases and for certain crimes. This becomes especially serious in cases of capital punishment which is severely affecting women from deprived socio-economic backgrounds and remote areas.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Women,
• Available languages NIGÉRIA : Les femmes et la peine de mortNigeria : Las mujeres y la pena de muerte en los sistemas penales nigerianos

The report indicates that most of the people sentenced to capital punishment, especially the poor and indigent, did not benefit from a fair trial, and that the conditions of detention – which is very long – constitute “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatments”. Furthermore, the FIDH fears that the possible moratoriums on the executions considered by several States only aims at improving the criminal procedures prior to the executions.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Country/Regional profiles,

In their new book, released in the Summer of 2022, University of Denver criminology and sociology professor Scott Phillips and University of Georgia sociologist Mark Cooney apply the concept of “social geometry,” developed in the 1970s by sociologist Donald Black, to analyze outcomes of capital cases. After reviewing extensive data collected in connection with the landmark Baldus Study of capital sentencing in Georgia and from the national Capital Jury Project, they conclude that the sentencing outcomes in the cases in those databases support key principles of Black’s theory: the higher the social status of the victim and the lower the social status of the defendant, the more likely a death sentence will be imposed.

• Document type Book
• Countries list United States

Two-thirds of the countries worldwide have moved away from the death penalty in law or in practice, with global and regional organisations as well as individual governments working towards universal abolition. This article critically examines the narratives of these abolitionist governments that have abolished the death penalty in their country and have adopted the role of ‘moral crusaders’ (Becker 1963) in pursuit of global abolition. In 2018, the Australian Government, while being surrounded by retentionist states in Asia, joined the anti–death penalty enterprise along with the European Union, the United Kingdom and Norway. Using the concepts of ‘moral crusader’ (Becker 1963) and ‘performativity’ (Butler 1993), this article argues that advocacy must be acted on repeatedly for governments to be anti–death penalty advocates. Otherwise, these government efforts serve political ends in appearance but are simply a self-serving form of advocacy in practice.
This article was first published in Crime Justice Journal: https://www.crimejusticejournal.com/issue/view/119

• Document type Academic report

• Document type International law - United Nations
• Available languages A/HRC/48/L.17/Rev.1 قرار اعتمده جملس حقوق اإلنسايفA/HRC/48/L.17/Rev.1 Resolución aprobada por el Consejo de DerechosA/HRC/48/L.17/Rev.1 Résolution adoptée par le Conseil des droits de l’hommeA/HRC/48/L.17/Rev.1 Резолюция, принятая Советом по правам человекаA/HRC/48/L.17/Rev.1 人权理事会 月 日通过的决议

In 2019-20, The Death Penalty Project, in partnership with LBH Masyarakat and the University of Indonesia, commissioned Professor Carolyn Hoyle, of The Death Penalty Research Unit at the University of Oxford to conduct research investigating attitudes towards the death penalty in Indonesia. The findings have been presented in a two-part report; the first details the findings of a nuanced public survey and the second details the findings of interviews conducted with opinion formers. The public opinion research was undertaken by surveying a stratified random sample of 1,515 respondents – a sample large enough to make inferences from the data about the views of the overall population.

• Document type NGO report
• Countries list Indonesia
• Themes list Drug Offenses / Public Opinion 

The use of capital punishment has been an issue addressed by international human rights law since the earliest days of the United Nations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, and an instrument widely recognised as the gold standard for human rights, affirms the right to life and the prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The Death Penalty Project produced this resource on international law and the death penalty.

• Document type NGO report

One of the most compelling forces behind the evolution of international attitudes towards capital punishment in recent decades has been the increasing recognition of the potential for error in its use – that those states that choose to retain the practice may be taking the lives of innocent individuals. The Death Penalty Project produced this resource on wrongful convictions and the death penalty.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Fair Trial

• Document type International law - United Nations
• Available languages A/HRC/RES/54/35قرار اعتمده مجلس حقوق اإلنسانA/HRC/RES/54/35 Resolución aprobada por el Consejo de Derechos HumanosA/HRC/RES/54/35 Résolution adoptée par le Conseil des droits de l’hommeA/HRC/RES/54/35 Резолюция, принятая Советом по правам человекаA/HRC/RES/54/35 人权理事会 通过的决议

Since the reintroduction of the death penalty in August 2004 more than 270 people have been sentenced to death in Iraq. Iraq now figures among the countries with the highest numbers of executions reported in 2006. Amnesty International is concerned that many of those sentenced to death by the Central Criminal Court of Iraq did not receive a fair trial. Amnesty International calls on the Iraqi government to immediately establish a moratorium on executions with a view to total abolition of the death penalty.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Country/Regional profiles,
• Available languages ل عدل فيها ول إنصاف: عقوبة العدام في العراقLa peine de mort en Irak: un châtiment injuste et iniquePena de muerte en Irak: arbitraria e injusta

On August 1, 2005, President Karimov announced, through a presidential decree, that the abolition of the death penalty was planned for January 1, 2008. The report concludes that the Uzbek authorities are responsible of serious and systematic human rights violations in the framework of the administration of criminal justice. The rights of those arrested are systematically violated. They often lack any access to a lawyer during their pre-trial detention, their families are not informed and torture is used in order to extort confessions, which often serve as a basis for their condemnation.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Torture, Death Row Conditions, Country/Regional profiles,
• Available languages Смертная казнь в Узбекистане: пытки и секретностьLa peine de mort en Ouzbékistan: torture et opacité

In August 2010, the Chinese government announced a draft amendment to China’s criminal law which would eliminate the death penalty for a total of 13 “economy-related nonviolent offenses,” including the smuggling of precious metals and cultural relics out of the country. However, the government has provided no indication regarding if or when the draft amendment might be approved, and, in September 2010, Chen Sixi, member of the National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee and vice chairman of the NPC’s Committee for Internal and Judicial Affairs, announced that the government would not in fact pursue these reforms.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Networks,

The latest edition of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Death Row, USA showed a continuing decline in the size of the death row population. The new total of 3,035 represented a 13% drop from 10 years earlier, when the death row population was 3,471. The racial demographics of death row have been steady, with white inmates making up 43% of death row, black inmates composing 42%, and Latino inmates 13%. California continued to have the largest death row, with 745 inmates, followed by Florida (404), Texas (276), Alabama (198), and Pennsylvania (188). Arkansas, which last carried out an execution nearly nine years ago, had a 13% decrease in its death row population since last year. The report also contains information about executions. Since 1976, 10% (143) of those executed were defendants who gave up their appeals.

• Document type International law - Regional body
• Themes list Due Process , Trend Towards Abolition,

Those proven to have been wrongfully convicted through postconviction DNA testing spend, on average, 12 years behind bars. The agony of prison life and the complete loss of freedom are only compounded by the feelings of what might have been, but for the wrongful conviction. Deprived for years of family and friends and the ability to establish oneself professionally, the nightmare does not end upon release. With no money, housing, transportation, health services or insurance, and a criminal record that is rarely cleared despite innocence, the punishment lingers long after innocence has been proven. States have a responsibility to restore the lives of the wrongfully convicted to the best of their abilities. This document describes how a state can try to recompensate an exonerated person.

• Document type Working with...
• Themes list Networks,

When the state decides to seek the death penalty against a criminal defendant, the cards are heavily stacked against him before the trial even starts. First, the defendant must face a jury that already assumes he is guilty simply because he has been charged with a crime. They will assume this all the more given that it is a capital case. Moreover, the jury selection process itself will produce a jury that is predisposed to vote both for guilt and for death.The purpose of this handbook is to provide some suggestions for ways to “unstack the deck” for capital defendants by challenging the state’s case in aggravation.

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

This article explores the constitutionality of the death penalty for those convicted of felony murder, i.e., those who participated in a serious crime in which a death occurred, but were not directly responsible for the death.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence,

The state of Texas incarcerated him for nearly two decades — and nearly executed him twice — for murders he didn’t commit. And now, the state is balking at giving him the $1.4 million he’s owed for all the years he spent wrongfully imprisoned.

• Document type Legal Representation
• Themes list Innocence,

California’s death penalty is dead. Prosecutors, legislators and taxpayers are turning to permanent imprisonment with no chance of parole as evidence grows that the system is costly, risky, and dangerous to public safety.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Trend Towards Abolition,

A quarterly report by the Criminal Justice Project of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, on the situation of the death penalty in the USA

• Document type NGO report

This study reflect on the aspects of fairness and accuracy as foundation of the American criminal justice system. As the Supreme Court of the United States has recognized, these goals are particularly important in cases in which the death penalty is sought. A system cannot claim to provide due process or protect the innocent unless it offers a fair and accurate system for every person who faces the death penalty.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Due Process , Country/Regional profiles,

Paralegals are becoming an increasingly important part of the criminal justice system in developing countries. By ensuring more people are aware of their rights within the prison system and can therefore represent themselves and follow up on their cases, paralegals contribute towards a reduction in numbers in pre-trial detention.

• Document type Working with...
• Themes list Country/Regional profiles,

The main aim of this article is to explore the problem of wrongful convictions in Japanese criminal justice by focusing on the case of Hakamada Iwao, who was sentenced to death in 1968 and released in 2014 because of evidence of his innocence.

• Document type Article
• Countries list Japan
• Themes list Fair Trial, Innocence,

In 2003, the Missouri Supreme Court set aside the death sentence of Christopher Simmons, who was 17 when he was arrested for the murder of Shirley Crook. The Simmons court held that the “evolving standards of decency” embodied in the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments barred execution of persons who committed capital crimes before their 18th birthday. This decision was based in part on the emerging legislative consensus in the states opposing execution of juvenile offenders and the infrequency with which the death penalty is imposed on juvenile offenders. The State sought a writ of certiorari, and the case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. This article presents results of analyses of empirical data on the use of the death penalty for adolescent homicide offenders in state courts in the U.S. since 1990. The data shows that, since 1994, when death sentences for juvenile offenders peaked, juvenile death sentences have declined significantly. In particular, the decline in juvenile death sentences since 1999 is statistically significant after controlling for the murder rate, the juvenile homicide arrest rate, and the rate of adult death sentences. This downward trend in juvenile death sentences signals that there is an evolving standard in state trial courts opposing the imposition of death sentences on minors who commit capital offenses.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Juveniles,

On December 18, DPIC released its annual report on the latest developments in capital punishment, “The Death Penalty in 2014: Year End Report.” In 2014, 35 people were executed, the fewest in 20 years. Death sentences dropped to their lowest level in the modern era of the death penalty, with 72 people sentenced to death, the smallest number in 40 years. Just seven states carried out executions, and three states (Texas, Missouri, and Florida) accounted for 80% of the executions. The number of states carrying out executions was the lowest in 25 years. Seven people were exonerated from death row this year, including three men in Ohio, who were cleared of all charges 39 years after their convictions, the longest time among all death row exonerees. There have now been 150 people exonerated from death row since 1973. “The relevancy of the death penalty in our criminal justice system is seriously in question when 43 out of our 50 states do not apply the ultimate sanction,” said Richard Dieter, DPIC’s Executive Director and the author of the report. “The U.S. will likely continue with some executions in the years ahead, but the rationale for such sporadic use is far from clear.”

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Networks, Statistics,

This study is about the question of whether the death penalty is a more effective deterrent than long-term imprisonment has been debated for decades or longer by scholars, policy makers, and the general public. In this Article the authors report results from a survey of the world’s leading criminologists that asked their expert opinions on whether the empirical research supports the contention that the death penalty is a superior deterrent.

• Document type Article
• Themes list Deterrence ,

The Chinese government continues to conceal the extent to which capital punishment is being used in China, despite more than four decades of requests from UN bodies and the international community and despite the Chinese authorities’ own pledges to bring about increased openness in the country’s criminal justice system. This report focuses on the extent to which the authorities maintain near absolute secrecy over the death penalty system, while using partial and generally unverifiable disclosures to claim progress and reject demands for greater transparency.

• Document type NGO report
• Countries list China
• Themes list Drug Offences, Death Penalty, Statistics, Country/Regional profiles,
• Available languages 中国的致命秘密

By Corey Burton and Richard Tewksbury

• Document type Working with...
• Themes list Public debate, Murder Victims' Families, Death Penalty, Country/Regional profiles,

Written in the spirit of “Dead Man Walking,” this book by Antoinette Bosco conveys both the powerful personal experience of a mother whose son was murdered and a wealth of information about the criminal justice system in America. (Orbis Books, 2001)

• Document type Working with...
• Themes list Public opinion, Murder Victims' Families, Death Penalty,

This review addresses four key issues in the modern (post-1976) era of capital punishment in the United States. First, why has the United States retained the death penalty when all its peer countries (all other developed Western democracies) have abolished it? Second, how should we understand the role of race in shaping the distinctive path of capital punishment in the United States, given our country’s history of race-based slavery and slavery’s intractable legacy of discrimination? Third, what is the significance of the sudden and profound withering of the practice of capital punishment in the past two decades? And, finally, what would abolition of the death penalty in the United States (should it ever occur) mean for the larger criminal justice system?

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Country/Regional profiles,

This report draws on in-depth interviews with 42 opinion leaders on the death penalty, their knowledge of the criminal justice system, the likelihood of abolition and how that could be achieved. They represent the fields of politics, public service, law, religion, civil society, academia, and defence.

• Document type NGO report
• Countries list Zimbabwe
• Themes list Public opinion,

California’s death penalty is arbitary, unnecessary and a waste of critical resources. Whilst the vast majority of California’s counties have largely abandoned execution in favor of simply sentencing people to die in prison, 10 counties continue to aggressively sentence people to execution, accounting for nearly 85 percent of death sentences since 2000. California’s death penalty has become so arbitary that the county border, not the facts of the case, determines who is sentenced to execution and who is simply sentenced to die in prison. Pursuing executions provides no identifiable benefit to these counties but costs millions.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Country/Regional profiles,

Almost everything we know about false convictions is based on exonerations in rape and murder cases, which together account for only 2% of felony convictions. Within that important but limited sphere we have learned a lot in the past 30 years; outside it, our ignorance is nearly complete. This review describes what we now know about convicting the innocent: estimates of the rate of false convictions among death sentences; common causes of false conviction for rape or murder; demographic and procedural predictors of such errors. It also explores some of the types of false convictions that almost never come to light—innocent defendants who plead guilty rather than go to trial, who receive comparatively light sentences, who are convicted of crimes that did not occur (as opposed to crimes committed by other people), who are sentenced in juvenile court—in fact, almost all innocent defendants who are convicted of any crimes other than rape or murder. Judging from what we can piece together, the vast majority of false convictions fall in these categories. They are commonplace events, inconspicuous mistakes in ordinary criminal investigations that never get anything close to the level of attention that sometimes leads to exoneration.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence,

This document provides brief commentary on the concept of “most serious crimes”, followed by a country by country overview of criminal offences punishable by death in retentionist states

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Trend Towards Abolition, Statistics,

A fair trial is a basic element of the notion of the rule of law, and the principles of ‘due process’ and ‘the rule of law’ are fundamental to the protection of human rights. At the centre of any legal system, therefore, must be a means by which legal rights are asserted and breaches remedied through the process of a fair trial in court, as the law is useless without effective remedies. The fairness of the legal process has a particular significance in criminal cases, as it protects against human rights abuses. Hence, constitutional due process and elementary justice require that the judicial functions of trial and sentencing be conducted with fundamental fairness, especially where the irreversible sanction of the death penalty is involved.

• Document type Article
• Themes list Fair Trial,

An in-depth analysis of the international law ramifications of applying the death penalty for drug offences. It reviews the the ‘most serious crimes’ threshold for the lawful application of capital punishment as established in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It then explores the question of whether drug offences meet this threshold by examining the issue through the lenses of international human rights law, the domestic legislation in retentionist states, international narcotics control law, international refugee law and international criminal law. The article concludes that drug offences do not constitute ‘most serious crimes’, and that executions of people for drug offences violates international human rights law.

• Document type Article
• Themes list Drug Offences, Most Serious Crimes,

Despite the sensitivity of the subject, the death penalty is currently a topic of public discussion among Chinese legal experts who are now openly wondering about its possible abolition. This debate is of interest on three counts. First, it goes hand-in-hand with a retrospective reading of the Chinese penal tradition, highlighting the succession of attempts at modernising criminal law for over a century. It also shows the ever present weight of the Maoist legacy and the contradictions of the present policy, caught between a concern for legality and continuing recourse to exceptional measures. Lastly, legal professionals and theorists alike are engaging in a review—based on specific cases—of the particular features of contemporary Chinese society and culture.

• Document type Article
• Countries list China
• Themes list Public debate,

There are two puzzles that confront observers of American capital punishment at the start of the 21st century. One concerns the legal and administrative arrangements through which it is enacted, which strike many commentators as irrational, or at least poorly adapted to the traditional ends of criminal justice. The other concerns the persistence of capital punishment in the USA in a period when comparable nations have decisively abandoned its use. In this essay, I will address both of these two questions, beginning with the first and offering conclusions that bear upon the second.The historical struggles around issues of capital punishment, structured as they have been by the American polity with its distinctive mix of federalism, sectionalism, and democratic populism, form the necessary basis for understanding the American present and for comparing America’s current practices with those of other western nations. Any explanation of American capital punishment ought to begin by focusing attention on these structures and these struggles.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

Reviews the use of the death penalty on juveniles in light of contemporary standards.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Juveniles,

One major goal of these recommendations is to create additional safeguards against the endemic tendency of decision-makers in the criminal justice system to “pass the buck.” The system is far too lax in catching errors and injustices in part because many of those who might catch these errors and injustices do not fully understand their own duty to ensure that a death sentence is the appropriate punishment. Several of these recommendations are addressed to those who occupy critical roles in the capital punishment system, including the defense attorney, the prosecutor, the jury, the trial judge, and the reviewing courts. They emphasize that each, individually, has the responsibility to ensure, to the best of his or her ability, that justice is done.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Networks,

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.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Mental Illness,

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.

• Document type NGO report
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Sentencing Alternatives, Networks,

The present report contains information covering the period from January 2004 to December 2005. The report indicates that the trend towards abolition of the death penalty continues; this is illustrated, inter alia, by the increase in the number of countries that are completely abolitionist and by the increase in ratifications of international instruments that provide for the abolition of this punishment.

• Document type International law - United Nations
• Themes list Trend Towards Abolition,
• Available languages مسألة عقوبة الإعدام; تقرير الأمين العامВопрос о смертной казни: Доклад Генерального секретаряQuestion de la peine de mort : Rapport du Secrétaire général死刑问题: 秘书长的报告La cuestión de la pena capital: Informe del Secretario General