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

• Document type Academic report

The abolition of the death penalty in Queensland in 1922 was the first in Australian jurisdictions, and the first in the British Empire. However, the legacy of the Queensland death penalty lingered in Australian colonial territories. This article considers a variety of practices in which the death penalty was addressed by Australian decision-makers during the first half of the 20th century. These include the exemption of Australian soldiers from execution in World War I, use of the death penalty in colonial Papua and the Mandate Territory of New Guinea, hanging as a weapon of war in the colonial territories, and the retrieval of the death penalty for the punishment of war crimes. In these histories, we see not only that the Queensland death penalty lived on in other contexts but also that ideological and political preferences for abolition remained vulnerable to the sway of other historical forces of war and security.
This article was first pubished in Crime Justice Journal: https://www.crimejusticejournal.com/issue/view/119

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list Australia

• Document type World Coalition
• Themes list Trend Towards Abolition
• Available languages Rapport d'Activité de la Coalition Mondiale 2022

At the start of the twenty-first century, America is in the midst of a profound national reconsideration of the death penalty. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of people being sentenced to death as well as executed, exonerations have become common, and the number of states abolishing the death penalty is on the rise. The essays featured in The Road to Abolition? track this shift in attitudes toward capital punishment, and consider whether or not the death penalty will ever be abolished in America.The interdisciplinary group of experts gathered by Charles J. Ogletree Jr., and Austin Sarat ask and attempt to answer the hard questions that need to be addressed if the death penalty is to be abolished. Will the death penalty end only to be replaced with life in prison without parole? Will life without the possibility of parole become, in essence, the new death penalty? For abolitionists, might that be a pyrrhic victory? The contributors discuss how the death penalty might be abolished, with particular emphasis on the current debate over lethal injection as a case study on why and how the elimination of certain forms of execution might provide a model for the larger abolition of the death penalty.

• Document type Book
• Countries list United States

The purpose of the Report is to assist the Honourable Court by describing the criminal justice process in Trinidad as it applies to those accused of murder. As a criminal defence and constitutional law attorneys in Trinidad, we have been asked to address, in particular, some of the shortcomings apparent in the Trinidadian criminal justice system and certain related constitutional issues. The Report deals with the following issues: a. The constitutional history and sources of law in Trinidad; b. The law of murder in Trinidad; c. An overview of criminal procedure; d. The stages of the criminal process in murder cases; e. The mandatory death penalty; f. The prerogative of mercy.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Networks,

Abolitionnist portrait

• Document type Campaigning
• Themes list Trend Towards Abolition
• Available languages Portrait d'abolitionnistes

Published in December 2023.

In popular, intellectual and political culture, the Middle Ages are intrinsically tied to violent images of public executions. To historians of the medieval period, this temporal attachment of the death penalty to a remote period is puzzling, especially since it is still widely enforced in the world today and was only relatively recently abolished in Europe. Capital punishment is not only a part of history, but a modern-day reality. Why, therefore, do we pin this punishment to the Middle Ages? This paper aims to analyse the discourses surrounding the usage of the Middle Ages in modern discussions on the death penalty, and to clarify medieval practices of capital punishment, showing how remote they are from our contemporary understanding

• Document type Academic Article
• Countries list United Kingdom

Published in 2023.

At the end of 2023, 34 countries retained the death for drug offences. In July 2023 Pakistan took the landmark decision to remove the death penalty from the list of punishments that can be imposed for certain violations of its Control of Narcotics Substances Act. This year also saw notable progress in Malaysia, which abolished the mandatory death penalty for all offences, including drug-related ones. This reform may impact the lives of over 700 people on death row for drug offences and bring the country one step closer to total abolition of capital punishment. In stark contrast to these positive developments is the record-high number of drug-related executions in 2023 at least 467. Of those executed, at least 59 people belonged to ethnic minority groups (in Iran and in Singapore), 13 individuals were foreign nationals, and six were women. These figures confirm that these groups are uniquely vulnerable to capital punishment as a tool of drug control. Despite not accounting for the dozens, if not hundreds, of executions believed to have taken place in China, Vietnam, and North Korea, the 467 executions that took place in 2023 represent a 44% increase from 2022.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Drug Offenses

Reprieve wrote this report about the use of the death penalty in Egypt.

• Document type NGO report
• Countries list Egypt
• Themes list Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment and Punishment / Death Row Conditions  / Fair Trial

Published in October 2023.

The most commonly observed fact of American capital punishment is its present outlier status: the United States (U.S.) is the only developed Western democracy that retains the death penalty, and it does so not simply as a matter of law, but as a matter of practice, conducting numerous executions every year. This “exceptionalism” with respect to the death penalty is noteworthy, but focusing on present-day American retention obscures many additional aspects of American death penalty exceptionalism. This Keynote will trace several ways in which the American death penalty was an outlier at its founding and throughout its subsequent history, as well as the varied aspects of its exceptionalism today. I will conclude by predicting that U.S. exceptionalism will soon come to an end–with an “exceptional” form of death penalty abolition, traceable to the distinctive path of the American death penalty

• Document type Academic Article
• Countries list United States

This report provides an update to the coauthors’ report at the List of issues stage and responds to the State party’s responses to the Committee’s questions in the List of issues that touch on the death penalty.

• Document type NGO report / World Coalition
• Countries list Iraq

This project examines the role of defence councils in Chinese criminal proceedings that can end up with the imposition of the death penalty. It aims to review the problems defence lawyers face in such proceedings, the defence strategies they apply and to examine whether the assignment of a defence lawyer makes a difference in the outcome of a criminal trial. Moreover, the project explores what can and should be done to empower defence councils to effectively represent suspects and accused in death penalty eligible cases.The objective of the study is to shed light on the problems experienced by criminal defence councils when defending capital crime cases and to generate information on how death penalty cases are processed through the Chinese system of justice as well as the determinants of the outcomes death penalty eligible criminal cases.

• Document type Article
• Countries list China
• Themes list Legal Representation,

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.

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

Greater Caribbean for Life has launched its educational toolkit to assist activists and organisations as they work toward abolishing the death penalty in the Greater Caribbean. The production of this toolkit forms part of GCL’s activities under its EU partnered project to educate on death penalty abolition in the Eastern Caribbean and Barbados.

The launch of the toolkit is timely as a few of these target countries recently voted against adopting the UN Moratorium on the use of the death penalty and countries that had previously chosen to abstain have now firmly voted against the resolution.

GCL members condemn the rise of violent crime in our region and express solidarity and compassion with the victims of crime, however, we reject the notion that capital punishment will act as a deterrent or foster respect for life in our communities.

It is our hope that this toolkit will assist in promoting respect for the right to life for all human beings in the Caribbean region.

• Document type Lobbying
• Countries list Barbados
• Themes list Trend Towards Abolition

Initiatives World Day 2006

• Document type Campaigning
• Themes list Trend Towards Abolition
• Available languages Initiatives journée mondiale 2006

Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.

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

The Miranda conundrum runs something like this: If the Miranda decision represents true constitutional interpretation, and all unwarned statements taken during custodial interrogation are compelled” within the meaning of the self-incrimination clause, the impeachment and “”fruits”” exceptions to Miranda should fall. If it is not true constitutional interpretation, than the Court has no business reversing state criminal convictions for its violation. I offer here what I hope is a satisfying answer to this conundrum, on both descriptive and normative levels, that justifies not only Miranda but a host of similar Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Court decisions as well. In Part I, I introduce and define the terms “”constitutional prophylactic rule,”” “”constitutional safe harbor rule,”” and “”constitutional incidental right,”” and attempt to legitimate their use. I further demonstrate that constitutional criminal procedure is so flush with such prophylactic and safe harbor rules and incidental rights that trying to eliminate them now, by either reversing a large number of criminal procedure cases or “”constitutionalizing”” all of those holdings, would do more harm than good. I propose that we accept the fact that these rules and rights are a fixed part of our constitutional landscape, and focus instead on minimizing their risks and maximizing their benefits”

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Fair Trial,

A how-to guide for advocates who want to improve the response to people with mental illnesses who are in contact with the criminal justice system. The Advocacy Handbook reflects a shared effort among NAMI (the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill), the National Mental Health Association (NMHA), the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD), the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, and the Criminal Justice / Mental Health Consensus Project.

• Document type Campaigning
• Themes list Networks,

The American Bar Association recently published The State of Criminal Justice 2012, an annual report that examines major issues, trends and significant changes in America’s criminal justice system.

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

Este artigo trata da pena de morte dentro da legislação criminal brasileira, analisando algumas sanções impostas no período colonial, por meio do Livro V das Ordenações Filipinas, bem como da legislação pertinente no Brasil Império, pelo Código Criminal de 1830 e suas reformas de 1832 e 1835. Por fim, discorre sobre o processo Motta Coqueiro e sua repercussão na sociedade, após decisão condenatória do réu, posteriormente provado inocente, com o intuito de acabar com este tipo de penalidade no Brasil.

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

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

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list India

• Document type Campaigning / World Coalition
• Available languages La théorie de la dissuasion démystifiée

Foreign nationals, and within this group migrant workers, are a population that disproportionately faces the death penalty around the world. The data and statistics gathered by Reprieve and Migrant CARE for this report show that migrant workers as a sub-set of the foreign national population are at grave risk of human rights violations related to the death penalty, including arbitrary deprivation of the right to life in the context of unlawful death sentences and executions.

This report focuses on: states that receive migrant workers (‘receiving states’), in particular the states that make up the Association of South East Asian Nations or ASEAN (‘South East Asian states’) and the Gulf Cooperation Council (‘Gulf states’), and on states from which migrant workers travel to work (‘sending states’).

• Document type NGO report
• Countries list Indonesia / Malaysia / Nigeria / Pakistan / Saudi Arabia
• Themes list Fair Trial / Legal Representation / Women

Published on February 11, 2024.

In 2002, Ra’id was arrested alongside several other suspects following a botched bank robbery that left two people dead and another paralyzed. His co-defendants pointed to him as the mastermind, which Ra’id adamantly denied. “I did not take part in that atrocity,” he told the court following his trial. “I did not shoot and kill anyone.”

Newson attended his father’s sentencing hearing, along with his mother, Jeannie Gipson-Newson. A death sentence would be “devastating to my child,” she remembered testifying. But it felt futile. The jurors seemed to have made up their minds. In 2004, Ra’id was sentenced to die.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States

• Document type Campaigning / World Coalition
• Available languages L'INSÉCURITÉ RÉVÉLÉE : Voix contre la peine de mort

Leaflet for the 21th World Day against the death penalty (2023), on torture and the death penalty.

• Document type Campaigning / World Coalition
• Available languages كتيب - اليوم العالمي 2023Brochure - Journée mondiale 2023

Published on October 7, 2023.

Of all retentionist countries, Singapore seems to be the most vocal about the need to execute individuals as a form of criminal punishment. MAI SATO (Monash University) reviews studies conducted or commissioned by Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs that claim public backing for and the effectiveness of the death penalty in managing drug trafficking. Sato finds that these studies provide far weaker evidence for using the death penalty for drug trafficking than their authors and officials citing them claim.

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list Singapore
• Themes list Drug Offenses

Since December 2007, seven resolutions in favour of a universal moratorium on death penalty executions have been adopted by the UN General Assembly. In an earlier paper (Pascoe and Bae 2020) we examined UN member states’ voting patterns over these seven resolutions, asking why some countries vote in a manner seemingly contradictory to their domestic death penalty practices. With a slightly different focus, we now further explore idiosyncratic state behaviour, this time through an analysis of co-sponsorship and the note verbale of dissociation. Our assumption is that states which plan to vote ‘yes’ in the plenary will also co-sponsor the resolution beforehand. We also presume that states which vote ‘no’ in the plenary will sign the note verbale invariably circulated several months later, as a further means of condemnation.

However, when it comes to the moratorium resolutions, not all member states fit into either of these binary categories. Many countries situate themselves in between the two groups of ‘genuine’ supporters and opponents. These countries in the middle evince inconsistency between their plenary votes and what we term their ‘association behaviour’ before or after the plenary, consisting of co-sponsorship and adherence to the note verbale. This paper analyses these groups of countries to determine the underlying causes for their ambivalent, or even contradictory, positions concerning the moratorium resolutions. The findings of this research stand to enrich not only the academic literature on international organizations, but also to inform the campaigning efforts of abolitionist UN member states and non-governmental organizations.

• Document type Academic report
• Themes list Moratorium

In Roper v. Simmons (2005), the US Supreme Court raised the minimum age at which someone could be subjected to capital punishment, ruling that no one under the age of 18 at the time of their crime could be sentenced to death. The present article discusses the legal context and rationale by which the Court established the current age-based limit on death penalty eligibility as well as the scientific basis for a recent American Psychological Association Resolution that recommended extending that limit to include members of the “late adolescent class” (i.e., persons from 18 to 20 years old). In addition, we present new data that address the little-discussed but important racial/ethnic implications of these age-based limits to capital punishment, both for the already established Roper exclusion and the APA-proposed exclusion for the late adolescent class. In fact, a much higher percentage of persons in the late adolescent class who were sentenced to death in the post-Roper era were non-White, suggesting that their age-based exclusion would help to remedy this problematic pattern.

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list United States

Report about the treatment of Pakistanis in the Saudi criminal justice system

• Document type NGO report
• Countries list Pakistan
• Themes list Discrimination, Foreign Nationals,

The release of Hakamada Iwao from death row in March 2014 after 48 years of incarceration provides an opportunity to reflect on wrongful convictions in Japanese criminal justice. My approach is comparative because this problem cannot be understood without asking how Japan compares with other countries: to know only one country is to know no country well. Comparison with the United States is especially instructive because there have been many studies of wrongful conviction there and because the U.S. and Japan are the only two developed democracies that retain capital punishment and continue to carry out executions on a regular basis. On the surface, the United States seems to have a more serious problem with wrongful convictions than Japan, but this gap is more apparent than real. To reduce the problem of wrongful convictions in Japanese criminal justice, reformers must confront a culture of denial that makes it difficult for police, prosecutors, and judges to acknowledge their own mistakes.

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

Reforming Criminal Justice is a four-volume report meant to enlighten reform efforts in the United States with the research and analysis of leading academics. Broken down into individual chapters—each authored by a top scholar in the relevant field—the report covers dozens of topics within the areas of criminalization, policing, pretrial and trial processes, punishment, incarceration, and release. The chapters seek to enhance both professional and public understanding of the subject matter, to facilitate an appreciation of the relevant scholarly literature and the need for reform, and to offer potential solutions. The ultimate goal is to increase the likelihood of success when worthwhile reforms are debated, put to a vote or otherwise considered for action, and implemented in the criminal justice system.

• Document type Academic report
• Themes list Due Process , Fair Trial, Legal Representation, Death Penalty,