Death Penalty News

“Individuals increasingly find themselves in cages unfit for lab mice and subjected to conditions with less scrutiny than that of invertebrate species kept in aquariums.” One hundred and thirty-five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged the devastating effects of solitary confinement. In an 1890 ruling declaring that Colorado had improperly subjected a man named James Medley to isolation, the court noted the practice had deleterious effects on the human psyche, including turning people “violently insane.” The court noted that others committed suicide, while “those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity.” 

Capital punishment was used extensively in colonial India by the British Empire to control its colonial subjects. The following is an excerpt from Justice Project Pakistan’s (JPP) book, The Death Penalty in Pakistan: A Critical Review , to be launched on July 11, 2019 in Islamabad.  A culmination of 10 years of JPP’s work, the book documents the many ways in which Pakistan's application of the death penalty intersects with legal, social and political realities. It focuses on how capital punishment impacts some of the most vulnerable populations: juveniles, the mentally ill, persons with physical disabilities, low-wage migrant workers imprisoned in foreign jails and the working class. Relying on public records for multiple JPP clients sentenced to death, nearly a decade of experience in the field, as well as extensive experience with legislation and advocacy, this book tracks the many junctures at which violations occur, from arrest to sentencing to execution. ...