The Guardian view on the death penalty: a long way to go

Though capital punishment is in global decline, there are horrifying exceptions to the general trend

Next month, Oklahoma will embark on a grim schedule: an execution nearly every month until the end of 2024. In September, it is due to execute Richard Glossip, whom many believe to be the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice. A 5-year moratorium has come to an end with the failure of a lawsuit arguing that the use of lethal injections was unconstitutional.

Oklahoma is not the only place that is enthusiastically resuming state-sanctioned killing after a pause. Myanmar’s rulers announced on Monday that they had executed 4 prisoners, including Phyo Zeya Thaw, a rapper and former MP, drawing international condemnation. This was the first time the death penalty had been used there for more than 30 years, said the UN. And on Tuesday it emerged that Tomohiro Kato has been executed in Japan for stabbing seven people to death in 2008.

Recorded executions fell sharply in 2020 across the world due to the pandemic, but are now rebounding. Amnesty International says that it saw a 20% increase in 2021, including a sharp rise in Iran to 314 deaths. This year, Saudi Arabia executed 81 men on a single day in March, two of them for participation in violent anti-government protests. Singapore executed four people for drug offences after a two-year pause – including, despite an international outcry, Nagaenthran K Dharmalingam, a young man with an IQ of 69 who said that he was coerced into carrying a small amount of heroin. His case has helped to stir debate about capital punishment. In Myanmar, more than 100 other people have been handed death sentences since last year’s seizure of power by the army.

The broad trend is towards the decline of capital punishment. Almost 160 years after Venezuela became the first country to abolish it [Portugal was the first country in the world to begin the process to abolish the death penalty, abolishing it in stages – for political crimes in 1852, for all crimes except the military in 1867, and for all crimes in 1911. - DPN], well over a hundred more have followed suit (including Papua New Guinea this January), and about 30 more have effectively abolished it, for example through formal moratoria. Despite the increase in 2021, the total number of deaths – 579 – was the second lowest that Amnesty International has recorded since 2010.

But a huge black hole remains: the organisation believes that China executes thousands of prisoners a year, but the figure is a state secret, as in Vietnam and North Korea. And the overall fall in the documented use of the death penalty is accompanied by extreme and shocking cases in places that cling to it. The US is also a glaring example of the way that progress can be turned back: 50 years ago this summer, the supreme court struck down the death penalty. Four years later it restored it. More recently, the last administration dramatically resumed federal executions; more were carried out under Donald Trump than any other president in the past century. Though the current attorney general, Merrick Garland, imposed a moratorium, that could be undone by the next administration.

There are many reasons to be disturbed by capital punishment. These include agonising deaths witnessed in the US, wrongful convictions, the blatant discrimination of criminal justice systems that results in the disproportionate killing of ethnic minority offenders, and the use of the death penalty for non-violent crimes and political offences. In Myanmar, relatives of the executed men were reportedly denied access to their bodies. But underlying all of this is the broader understanding that continues to spread through the world: that states have no right to take the lives of citizens.

Source: The Guardian, Editorial, July 26, 2022

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

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