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INTERNATIONAL: New Report on China's Changing Attitudes Toward the Death Penalty

Roger Hood (pictured), Professor Emeritus of Criminology at the University of Oxford, has published a report on official attitudes towards capital punishment in China. Abolition of the Death Penalty: China in World Perspective outlines the changes over the past decade on this issue within Chinese academic and judicial communities. Hood observed that one of the strongest justifications for the death penalty in China is “the belief that retribution based on the notion of ‘a life for a life’ was deeply embedded in Chinese culture; that ignoring this support might cause social instability; and that China [is] not yet sufficiently economically developed that it could do away with an effective criminal sanction.” Nevertheless, Hood points out that despite secrecy around the country’s death penalty, “no one can doubt that a movement towards restriction and eventual abolition has got under way.” He attributes the shift in attitudes on the death penalty to the emerging international narrative that suggests capital punishment should be treated not as “a weapon of national criminal justice policy,” but as “a fundamental violation of universal human rights: not only the right to life but the right to be free from excessive, repressive and tortuous punishments - including the risk that an innocent or undeserving person may be executed.”

Hood concludes that “the last few years have witnessed a distinct change in the discourse, evidenced by the willingness of the Chinese authorities to discuss the death penalty in human rights seminars and dialogues with European countries, the gradual opening up of the subject to research, and the attempt to guard against wrongful conviction and control the incidence of executions through review of all death penalty verdicts by the Supreme People’s Court.” Read full report.

(R. Hood, "Abolition of the Death Penalty: China in World Perspective," City University of Hong Kong Law Review, 2009). See International. Read more Studies on the death penalty.

RACE: New Video Highlights Stories of Jurors Excluded from Death Penalty Cases

A new video produced by the American Civil Liberties Union features three North Carolina citizens who believe they were excluded from serving on juries in capital cases because of their race. The video was released in conjunction with the first court challenge brought under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act. The defendant, Marcus Robinson, is asking his death sentence be commuted to life without parole because potential African-American jurors were struck from his jury at a rate 3.5 times higher than other potential jurors. Laverne Keys (pictured), who was excluded from a capital jury in 1999, believes she was removed because of her race: “It made me feel like I was back in 1960, that racism is still very much alive. It makes you wonder whether all these people are being given a fair trial or given a fair consequence so far as the death penalty,” she said in the video. Denny LeBoeuf, Director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, said, “The stories presented in this video make clear that the death penalty system in North Carolina and across the nation is plagued by discrimination. The Racial Justice Act is a crucial means of ensuring that no one is wrongfully executed because of racial bias.” Watch the video.

The Racial Justice Act allows death-row prisoners a hearing in which they can present statistics and other empirical evidence showing that death sentences in the state were influenced by race. North Carolina has the nation’s sixth-largest death row population, more than half of whom are African-American. Thirty-one people on North Carolina’s death row were sentenced by all-white juries. Watch ACLU’s video.

(ACLU Press Release, "North Carolinians Struck From Capital Juries Because of Race Speak Out in Favor of Racial Justice Act," February 2, 2012). See Race and Multimedia.