Resources

This report provides a review of our work with partners and colleagues across 2019 and our upcoming work in 2020.

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…

Evidence from around the world demonstrates that no matter how well developed, resourced and sophisticated a criminal justice system may be, human error filters into any system, making mistakes in the application of the death penalty, which are often irreversible, inevitable. The prevalence of wrongful convictions has exposed the fallibility of every criminal justice model and has led some states…

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…

Kenya has not carried out an execution for over 30 years. Thousands however remain on death row and continue to be sentenced to death due to the automatic nature of the death penalty. In December 2017, the Supreme Court of Kenya declared the mandatory #deathpenalty unconstitutional. What does this mean and how will it affect prisoners currently on death row…

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…

The Death Penalty Project, in association with the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (TAEDP), has published a review of wrongful convictions in capital cases in Taiwan. The report reveals a number of concerns in the administration of criminal justice in Taiwan, demonstrating evidence that the death penalty may be enforced without uncorrected error, resulting in the risk of…

This report looks at The Death Penalty Project’s key achievements in 2018 and our upcoming work in 2019.

An inescapable truth of the death penalty is that wherever it exists there is the risk that innocent people will end up on death row. There is no perfect justice system and we know that mistakes occur wherever you are in the world. In 2016 alone at least 60 death row prisoners were exonerated globally. This video tells the story of one…