Five Conversations

In this conversation, Anthony Burton, Founding Partner at Simons Muirhead Burton and Chair of The Death Penalty Project’s Board of Directors and Trustees, and Tatiana Hepher, an Associate in Simon Muirhead Burton’s Civil team, trace the origins of The Death Penalty Project. They explore how a small number of pro bono death penalty cases undertaken by the firm in the 1970s evolved into a dedicated legal action charity that now works in more than 20 countries.

In this film, Bertil Fox, our former client, recounts the day he was sentenced to death, describes the realities of life on death row and reflects on the execution of a fellow inmate. Shaun Fox, Bertil’s son, speaks about the profound impact the death penalty has on the mental health and wellbeing of impacted families, highlighting how the punishment affects far more than one individual. The conversation reveals the profound human costs of capital punishment systems.

In this conversation, Professor Carolyn Hoyle, Director of the Death Penalty Research Unit, University of Oxford, and Professor Jon Yorke, Director of the Centre for Human Rights at Birmingham City University, explore some of the most common misconceptions surrounding capital punishment. They examine what decades of empirical research reveal about the realities of death penalty systems in practice, and how this evidence can be used to influence criminal justice reform worldwide.

In this conversation, Hsinyi Lin, Director of the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty and Francis-Xavier Sosu, Ghanaian Member for Parliament, reflect on the obstacles they have faced in their efforts to drive abolition of the death penalty in Taiwan and Ghana respectively. From deeply entrenched political resistance to persistent myths about deterrence, the conversation reveals the complexities of advocating for reform in retentionist environments.

In this conversation, our Co-Executive Directors Saul Lehrfreund and Parvais Jabbar reflect on three decades years of leading The Death Penalty Project. Amidst reflections on how the organisation developed from fighting to prevent individual executions, to now influencing policy reform at the domestic and international level, they discuss the continued urgency of the death penalty as a critical human rights issue and what is next for the organisation in our mission to end capital punishment, everywhere.