Studies

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.”

A new study by the organization Together Against the Death Penalty examined the status of capital punishment in the U.S. through a series of interviews and visits to death penalty states in 2010. The report, 999 - The Death Penalty in the United States, was written by Arnaud Gaillard and it exposes some of the serious problems with capital punishment in this country from a human rights perspective. The report calls on decision-makers to take a closer look at the conditions of those awaiting execution and at the risk of arbitrariness in the implementation of the death penalty.  Gaillard wrote, “Indeed death rows are not full of innocents. Some of them have committed horrible crimes… When one looks closer, it is likely that the authors of the worst ills in American society are not necessarily the ones found on death row. With luck, sufficient funds and networks, the privileged have the means to escape the death penalty.” The report consists of empirical research, interviews and questionnaires from states like California, Utah, Oklahoma, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

(On January 10, DPIC posted an item about an editorial in the New York Times criticizing the arbitrariness of the death penalty.  That editorial relied heavily on the research of Prof. John Donohue (pictured) of Stanford Law School and his study of the Connecticut death penalty.  This post looks further at the underlying study.)  Prof. Donohue's research found that out of thousands of murders committed in Connecticut between 1973 and 2007, only one resulted in an execution of the defendant. He concluded that "the state’s record of handling death-eligible cases represents a chaotic and unsound criminal justice policy that serves neither deterrence nor retribution. . . .At best, the Connecticut system haphazardly singles out a handful for execution from a substantial array of horrible murders," and that "arbitrariness and discrimination are defining features of the state’s capital punishment regime."