Two African nations—The Gambia and Madagascar—acting in connection with the 72nd Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, have taken major steps committing themselves to the irreversible abolition of the death penalty. On Thursday, September 21, shortly after making his first address to the United Nations, The Gambia's President Adama Barrow signed the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aiming at the abolition of the death penalty at the 72nd General Assembly of the United Nations, committing his nation to death penalty abolition. For The Gambia, this is the first step in abolishing the death penalty. The small West African nation last carried out an execution in 2012, when nine prisoners were executed by firing squad. Those executions, the first in 31 years, had been widely criticized. President Barrow said that The Gambia's acceptance of the treaty shows the nation’s commitment to promote democracy and “protect lives of political activists.” Also on September 21, at a General Assembly event devoted to the treaty, Madagascar completed the ratification process by depositing the instruments of ratification with the United Nations’ General Secretary. The Gambia and Madagascar bring the total number of signed parties to 85. Madagascar, an island nation off the Southeast coast of the African continent, signed the Second Optional Protocol at the 67th U.N. General Assembly in September 2012 and abolished the death penalty by law in January 2015. The nation of 20 million has not executed anyone since 1958. The United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1966 as part of the International Bill of Human Rights, which also includes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted in 1948). The ICCPR has two optional protocols that nations may join. The First Optional Protocol, which 116 parties have signed, created an international tribunal—the U.N. Human Rights Committee—to adjudicate complaints about human rights violations. The Second Optional Protocol, adopted in 1989, obligates its signatories to abolish the death penalty, although countries are permitted to make reservations permitting use of the death penalty for certain war crimes. Brazil, with a population of more than 209 million, is the largest nation to sign the treaty, which it ratified in 2009. China, India, and the United States, the most populous nations in the world, have not signed the treaty.

("Gambia: President Barrow Signs Abolition Of Death Penalty Treaty," Jollof Media Network, September 21, 2017; A. Placais, "Gambia and Madagascar commit to irreversible abolition," World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, September 22, 2017.) Read the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights here. 

An Arapahoe County judge has denied the appeal of Colorado death-row prisoner Sir Mario Owens (pictured), despite finding that prosecutors withheld evidence and failed to disclose money, gifts, and favors they provided informants in exchange for their testimony. In a 1,343-page Order and Opinion issued on September 14, Senior Judge Christopher Munch found that county prosecutors had presented false evidence from two of their most critical witnesses and unconstitutionally withheld more than 20 separate pieces of evidence that could have helped the defense challenge the testimony of seven prosecution witnesses, but said a defendant "must establish more than helpfulness to sustain a claim of constitutional error." The ruling followed the controversial removal from the case of Senior Judge Gerald Rafferty, as the judge was preparing his decision after having presided over the case for more than a decade. Rafferty had ordered the prosecution to produce hundreds of pages of records and granted 37 weeks of hearings on what he had characterized as prosecutors’ “deliberate choice” to withhold evidence from the defense. Owens was sentenced to death in June 2008 for the 2005 shooting death of Javad Marshall-Fields (the son of a Colarado state representative) and Fields's fiancé, Vivian Wolfe. A co-defendant, Robert Ray, was separately tried and sentenced to death. The case against Owens was largely circumstantial. As described by news reports in The Colorado Independent, there was "no definitive physical evidence, no confession, and no eyewitnesses who identified Owens in a case prosecutors built almost entirely on the testimony of informant witnesses to whom the DA’s office gave plea bargains, funds, or both in return for their cooperation against Owens."  Owens alleged that the prosecution had withheld evidence from the defense that they had secured the testimony of cooperating informants by making thousands of dollars of cash payments and providing undisclosed favors in unrelated criminal cases. The Denver Post reported that one witness had been "promised and later given a district attorney’s office car" and another "received $3,400 in benefits, including cash for Christmas presents in the months prior to testifying on behalf of the prosecution." The Colorado Independent's review of court records reported that "one of the main witnesses [had been] threatened with being charged for the murders Owens was accused of and with receiving two life sentences" if he didn’t cooperate. Another witness had been granted an undisclosed suspended jail sentence conditioned upon cooperating with prosecutors in Owens’s case. "People working for the prosecution would appear at informant witnesses’ court hearings and ask for lesser sentences on the condition that they testify against Owens," the paper wrote, and "informants who had been convicted of crimes were allowed to violate probation and commit future crimes without consequences as long as they cooperated." Owens's appeal has attracted attention because it was the first in Colorado's "unitary review" process that had been billed as speeding up capital appeals. Instead, it has substantially increased the length of appeals. It also raised questions of transparency because of the extraordinary levels of secrecy throughout the proceedings. Court files were sealed and a gag order prevented the parties from speaking about the case for seven years, until the order was lifted in 2013. Numerous case exhibits remain under seal. Owens's lawyers issued a written statement saying “We disagree with the court’s conclusion that none of this matters and can be tolerated in Colorado in any case, never mind a capital one. This is a sad day for ... the Colorado criminal justice system.”

A 2015 study found racial and geographic disparities in Colorado prosecutors' decision to seek the death penalty, with the death penalty more likely to be pursued against non-white defendants and defendants in Colorado’s 18th Judicial District, which includes Arapahoe County.  All three prisoners on the state's death row are black and from Arapahoe County.

(J. Ingold, "Judge denies major appeal in Sir Mario Owens death penalty case," Denver Post, September 14, 2017; S. Greene, "Three men still on Colorado’s death row after judge denies capital appeal," The Colorado Independent, September 14, 2017; J. Ingold, "Colorado Supreme Court denies petition over fired judge in death penalty case," Denver Post, July 12, 2016.) Read the trial court's Order and Opinion in State v. Owens, No. 06CR705 (Arapaho Dist. Ct.). See Colorado, Race, and Prosecutorial Misconduct.