Criminal trials in these courts often occur behind closed doors presided over by clerics, and there’s often no evidence beyond a confession extracted by means of torture.
In 1972, justices handed down a decision that attacked discriminatory and capricious death sentences. But it left the door ajar for states to continue the practice.
Myanmar’s military junta is losing some control over the country, but its execution of four high-profile leaders and prisoners sends a warning to Myanmar citizens and the rest of the world.
The Justice Department has approved alternatives to lethal injections for federal executions. But no method of capital punishment has been without gruesome stories of what went wrong.
The promised benefits of lethal injection – a quick, painless death – have never come true. There’s not even agreement about which drugs are best for executions.
Many recent executions in the US by lethal injections have resulted in prolonged suffering before death. A historian asks: Could the guillotine be a preferable method?
To understand Rodrigo Duterte’s rise to power and the public support for killing drug dealers and users, we need to distinguish the empirical from the normative – the ‘what is’ from ‘what should be’.
Capital punishment is unfairly imposed, innocent people are regularly condemned and it is patently ineffective in deterring crime. So why to states retain the death penalty?
As with most aspects of criminal justice in sub-Saharan Africa, the death penalty as it currently exists in law is a colonial import. Criminal justice before the modern era was a private matter.