Death Penalty News

At least nine young Saudis who were juveniles at the times of their alleged crimes currently face imminent execution in Saudi Arabia—despite the fact that Saudi authorities supposedly eliminated or otherwise severely limited the scope of the death penalty for juvenile offenders in recent years. One of these nine young Saudis on death row was only 12 years old at the time of his alleged crime. Their looming executions fly in the face of a royal decree in 2020 abolishing the death penalty for most crimes committed when defendants were minors. That decree followed the Juvenile Law introduced in 2018, which had set a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison for anyone under the age of 18 convicted of most crimes that previously came with the death penalty.

An idle threat, but the teenage suspect confessed. The Exoneration Registry, which tracks false confession cases, says they have counted at least 27 false confession cases across the country where suspects were threatened with the imposition of the death penalty. Recent research tells us that false confessions are more common than we previously thought and that teenagers, in particular , are vulnerable to the kind of police coercion that brings them about. The problem has been particularly acute in Chicago , where incidents of false confession, especially those involving juvenile suspects in Cook County, reportedly occur at far higher rates than they do in other jurisdictions around the country. In September, an appeals court in Illinois issued a ruling in a Chicago murder case that raises questions about the reliability of a young man’s “confession.” Police interrogators repeatedly threatened him with the death penalty even though he was ineligible for capital punish...