Our story

Our history

From a few lawyers working out of a leaky attic in Soho to a legal action organisation with consultative status before the United Nations, we have come a long way over the last five decades.

How it began

In 1975, London-based law firm, Simons Muirhead Burton LLP (SMB) were instructed as lawyers for Michael de Frietas (Michael X) in a high-profile death penalty case in Trinidad and Tobago. Michael was executed. The case motivated the firm to take on more death penalty cases, and the word spread in various Caribbean prisons that lawyers in London would take on appeals, free of charge.

Over the next 15 years, SMB were contacted by an increasing number of people needing legal support to challenge their death sentences before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the final court of appeal for many Commonwealth Caribbean countries. In the early 1990s, the firm decided it was time to hire Saul Lehrfreund and Parvais Jabbar – who remain our Co-Executive Directors to this day – as death penalty and human rights specialists dedicated to the cause.

The Death Penalty Project becomes a registered legal action organisation

Initially, our work continued to focus on the Caribbean, providing free legal representation to individuals whilst also bringing wider challenges to the legality of the death penalty, particularly where it was the compulsory punishment for certain crimes. But news of our legal victories, including our landmark win with clients Earl Pratt and Ivan Morgan in Jamaica, began rippling beyond the region.

In particular, in 2003, when our successful challenge to the mandatory death penalty in Belize, St Kitts & Nevis and St Lucia led to more than 200 people being removed from death rows and resentenced, it created a precedent which is still used to challenge the mandatory death penalty around the world to this day. It also led to us being invited to support legal challenges in Uganda and Malawi, both of which were successful and resulted in over 1000 people being removed from death row.

Given the expansion of our work in these early decades from a few countries in the Caribbean to both the African and Asian continents, the time came for the organisation to register as an independent entity – and so in 2005, The Death Penalty Project was officially formed.

We are making huge progress, but the fight for justice and dignity continues

When SMB first started representing individuals on death row in 1975, only 20 countries had abolished death penalty. We have come a long way. Some 124 countries have now consigned the punishment to history. The Death Penalty Project has been instrumental in achieving abolition of the mandatory death penalty in 13 countries, and in the last five years alone, we have contributed to outlawing capital punishment for ordinary or all crimes in Sierra Leone, Ghana and, most recently, Zimbabwe.

We currently work in more than 20 countries and in any one year provide legal representation and assistance to more than 70 people. Though, at our core, we are fierce litigators, our team and strategies now expand beyond the legal sphere into policy engagement, research and alliance building. Over five decades of continuous death penalty work, we have also nurtured a global network of partners, who are all vital collaborators in our joint fight for justice and dignity.

But the work continues – and remains incredibly urgent. Executions are on the rise, meaning less countries are killing more people. More than 28,000 people globally are estimated to be on death row. This means we have never been more in need of support from people like you, who have fuelled this work for decades and are the most critical ingredient in global momentum towards abolition.