On March 27, Amnesty International released its annual survey on the use of capital punishment worldwide, titled Death Sentences and Executions 2011. The report illustrated that the use of the death penalty has continued to decline around the world. At the end of 2011, there were 140 countries considered abolitionist in law or practice, while only 20 countries were known to have put prisoners to death in 2011. The United States was the only country in the Western hemisphere or among the G8 nations to carry out executions, and was the fifth country in terms of known executions carried out in the world, behind China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. China reportedly conducts thousands of executions in a year, but the exact number is not known. With 13 executions, Texas would have ranked 7th as an independent country, between North Korea and Somalia. The report nevertheless highlighted signs of substantially reduced support for the death penalty in the U.S., including the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois, a moratorium on executions in Oregon, a significant decline nationally in death sentences, and a smaller decline in executions in 2011.
In the latest edition of the Death Penalty Information Center's podcasts, Professor Michael H. Fox, director of the Japan Innocence and Death Penalty Research Center, discusses the current state of the death penalty in Japan. Prof. Fox compares public opinion on the death penalty in Japan and the U.S., explains some of the unique aspects of Japan's criminal justice system, and discusses the prospects for change. 
On March 27, a federal District Court held that foreign-manufactured sodium thiopental was improperly approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in executions. Judge Richard Leon (pictured) of the District Court of the District of Columbia ordered any correctional departments in possession of the drug to return it to the FDA. The ruling granted summary judgment in favor of a lawsuit filed by death row inmates in Arizona, California, and Tennessee against the FDA. Those states, along with several others, had obtained sodium thiopental, an anesthetic used in lethal injections, from foreign sources after the sole U.S. manufacturer ceased production. The inmates contended "that unapproved foreign thiopental will fail to anesthetize plaintiffs properly during execution, causing conscious suffocation, pain, and cardiac arrest." According to Judge Leon, the foreign sodium thiopental "is a misbranded drug and an unapproved new drug" and "the FDA neither approved nor reviewed thiopental for safety and effectiveness." A January 2011 statement released by the FDA said "[r]eviewing substances imported or used for the purpose of state-authorized lethal injection clearly falls outside of FDA's explicit public health role." The judge disagreed, saying "the FDA appears to be simply wrapping itself in the flag of law enforcement discretion to justify its authority and masquerade an otherwise seemingly callous indifference to the health consequences of those imminently facing the executioner's needle."
Roger Hood (pictured), Professor Emeritus of Criminology at the University of Oxford, has published a report on official attitudes towards capital punishment in China. Abolition of the Death Penalty: China in World Perspective outlines the changes over the past decade on this issue within Chinese academic and judicial communities. Hood observed that one of the strongest justifications for the death penalty in China is “the belief that retribution based on the notion of ‘a life for a life’ was deeply embedded in Chinese culture; that ignoring this support might cause social instability; and that China [is] not yet sufficiently economically developed that it could do away with an effective criminal sanction.” Nevertheless, Hood points out that despite secrecy around the country’s death penalty, “no one can doubt that a movement towards restriction and eventual abolition has got under way.” He attributes the shift in attitudes on the death penalty to the emerging international narrative that suggests capital punishment should be treated not as “a weapon of national criminal justice policy,” but as “a fundamental violation of universal human rights: not only the right to life but the right to be free from excessive, repressive and tortuous punishments - including the risk that an innocent or undeserving person may be executed.”