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This article discusses the role of judges in death determinations, identifying jurisdictions that initially (post-1972) allowed judge sentencing and naming the individuals who today remain under judge-imposed death sentences. The decisions guaranteeing a jury determination have so far been applied only to cases that have not undergone initial review in state courts. Key questions remain unresolved, including whether the evolving standards of decency permit the execution of more than 100 individuals who were condemned to death by judges without a jury’s death verdict before implementation of the rules that now require unanimous jury votes.

• Document type Academic report
• Themes list Due Process , Fair Trial,

Singapore recently amended its laws to replace the mandatory death penalty regime for murder and drug trafficking with a discretionary sentencing regime under certain conditions. One of the conditions with respect to drug trafficking was that the convicted trafficker had to be granted a certificate by the Public Prosecutor stating that the trafficker had provided substantive assistance that led to the disruption of drug trafficking activities. That decision is not subject to judicial review except under very narrow circumstances, protected in the same way as the constitutionally protected prosecutorial discretion.

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

A new study by an interdisciplinary team of Arizona State University psychology researchers has found a link between the actual and perceived scarcity of resources and support for capital punishment. The study discovered that countries with greater resource scarcity were more likely to have a death penalty, as were U.S. states with lower per capita income.

• Document type Academic report
• Themes list Death Penalty, Financial cost,

Ndume, 56 years old, spent 28 years in prison in the US, 20 of which on death row, for a crime he did not commit. Today, he is human rights activist, and fight with us for the abolition of the death penalty. He is also a very gifted painter.

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Death Row Conditions, Death Penalty,

Death qualification has been shown to have a number of biasing effects that appear to undermine a capital defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a fair jury. Attitudes toward the death penalty have shifted modestly but consistently over the last several decades in ways that may have changed the overall impact of death qualification. Specifically, the very large gap between black and white Americans’ current support for capital punishment raises the question of whether death qualification procedures disproportionately exclude African Americans from capital jury participation. In order to examine this possibility, we conducted two countywide death penalty attitude surveys in the California county that has the highest percentage of African American residents in the state. Results show that death qualification continues to have a number of serious biasing effects—including disproportionately excluding death penalty opponents—which result in the significant underrepresentation of African Americans. This creates a death‐qualified jury pool with the potential to be significantly more likely to ignore and even misuse mitigating factors and to rely more heavily on aggravating factors in their death penalty decision making. The implications of these findings for the fair administration of capital punishment are discussed.

• Document type Academic report

On March 7, 2018, the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide launched its new report entitled Justice Denied: A Global Study of Wrongful Death Row Convictions at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. The report is a first-of-its-kind comparative study of the risk factors that increase the likelihood of wrongful convictions. The report illuminates the similarities in wrongful conviction risk factors in six countries across the geographical and political spectrum: Cameroon, Indonesia, Jordan, Malawi, Nigeria, and Pakistan.

• Document type Academic report
• Themes list Innocence, Death Row Conditions, Death Penalty,
• Available languages Déni de justice : Une étude mondiale sur les erreurs judiciaires dans les couloirs de la mort

Informations and survey findings about the public opinion on the death penalty in Singapore

• Document type Academic report
• Themes list Public opinion, Death Penalty,

This study is a joint collaboration between international law expert Dr Christopher Ward SC, Senior Counsel of the New South Wales Bar and Adjunct Professor of the Australian National University, and the Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines.

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

26 individuals that Ohio intends to execute each suffer from some combination of severe mental illness, intellectual disability, serious childhood trauma from physical and sexual abuse, or were young adults with impaired judgment when they committed their crimes.

• Document type Academic report
• Themes list Mental Illness, Intellectual Disability, Death Penalty,

In March 2017, Rick Scott, Governor of Florida, responded to a State Attorney’s decision not to pursue the death penalty because of its demonstrable flaws by ordering her replacement with a prosecutor willing to engage in this lethal pursuit. Since then the governor has transferred 27 capital murder cases to his preferred prosecutor. Two of these cases have already resulted in juries voting for death sentences.

• Document type Academic report
• Themes list Fair Trial, Legal Representation, Country/Regional profiles,