Resources

Between 2017–2019 The Death Penalty Project, our local partner, Veritas, commissioned leading academics from The University of Reading and The Death Penalty Research Unit, at the University of Oxford, to undertake research to provide the accurate and authoritative data on attitudes towards the death penalty in Zimbabwe.  Interviews with 42 opinion leaders and a public opinion survey of a representative…

In 2019-20, The Death Penalty Project, in partnership with LBH Masyarakat and the University of Indonesia, commissioned Prof. Carolyn Hoyle of the Death Penalty Research Unit at the University of Oxford to conduct a thorough survey of attitudes towards the death penalty in Indonesia. The research aimed to better understand attitudes and facilitate a nuanced discourse.  This briefing note presents…

In 2019-20, The Death Penalty Project, in partnership with LBH Masyarakat and the University of Indonesia, commissioned Professor Carolyn Hoyle, of The Death Penalty Research Unit at the University of Oxford to conduct research investigating attitudes towards the death penalty in Indonesia. The findings have been presented in a two-part report; the first details the findings of a nuanced public…

In 2019-20, The Death Penalty Project, in partnership with LBH Masyarakat and the University of Indonesia, commissioned Professor Carolyn Hoyle, of The Death Penalty Research Unit at the University of Oxford to conduct research investigating attitudes towards the death penalty in Indonesia. The findings have been presented in a two-part report; the first details the findings of a nuanced public…

In 2019-20, The Department of Law at the University of Dhaka, in collaboration with the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust (BLAST) and The Death Penalty Project, conducted a study to investigate socio-economic characteristics and experiences of death row prisoners in Bangladesh. Bangladesh continues to retain and implement the death penalty, with several executions taking place each year. Excluding laws…

This report draws on in-depth interviews with 42 opinion leaders on the death penalty, their knowledge of the criminal justice system, the likelihood of abolition and how that could be achieved. They represent the fields of politics, public service, law, religion, civil society, academia, and defence. The main finding indicates that 90% of those interviewed supported abolition of the death…

By Roger Hood and Florence Seemungal with the assistance of Amaya Athill Six independent nations in the Eastern Caribbean – Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, and St Vincent and the Grenadines, all members of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) – and Barbados, retain the death penalty for murder. Most of these countries…

Most public opinion polls, both in Taiwan and throughout the world, erroneously present the death penalty as a clear-cut issue that one is either for or again. Closer examination of the context and complexities of public opinion invariably reveals that, as with other views on criminal justice policy, attitudes towards capital punishment shift depending on a variety of factors, from the…

In December 2017, in Muruatetu v Republic of Kenya, the Supreme Court of Kenya declared the mandatory death penalty to be unconstitutional. In reaching its verdict, the Court relied on jurisprudence from other Commonwealth countries where the mandatory death penalty has been found to violate fundamental human rights. Kenya is the 13th country where we have successfully brought and/or supported…

The Death Penalty Project, in association with the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (TAEDP), has published a study of public attitudes towards the death penalty in Taiwan. The aim of the research is to provide a robust analysis of public opinion, going beyond the simple “for or against” questions upon which opinion polls are typically based. This study…

In Indonesia, offences in addition to intentional murder are eligible for punishment via death, including terrorism, drug trafficking, and weapons or firearms offences. This report assesses the feasibility of conducting systematic empirical research on the deterrent effects of the death penalty on drug and other criminal offences in Indonesia. Indonesian law justifies the use of the death penalty for drug…

A scoping project was carried out by The Death Penalty Project, Columbia University, and the University of Oxford in January 2019 identified three key assumptions behind Indonesia’s ‘war on drugs’: that the public is strongly in favour of capital punishment for drug offenders; that only the death penalty can deter drug offences; and that those who are prosecuted and sentenced…