Notes for Talk preceding a Screening of Guilty at the Palace Barracks Cinema on (original) (raw)
Citizenship and punishment: Situating death penalty jury sentencing
Although capital punishment in the United States is subject to much social scientific scrutiny, there has been little ethnographic study of death penalty trials. This is not only an empirical lacuna, but also a theoretically and politically important one: by failing to take capital trials as primary objects of inquiry, the practices of lawyers, witnesses, judges, and others are viewed as products of, rather than implicated in, the institution of criminal justice. Based on an ethnography of fifteen death penalty sentencing trials across the United States during 2007, 2008, and 2009, this article seeks to understand the role of juries in capital trials. While judges customarily make sentencing decisions in American criminal cases, capital cases require jury sentencing. Key to understanding this unusual requirement is the recruitment of potential jurors into a role I term punitive citizenship. Through the process of choosing ‘death qualified’ jurors for trial, capital jurors are asked to call upon their own moral positions in conjunction with their responsibility to the collective to decide on appropriate punishments for defendants who are singled out for capital prosecution by the state. This ensures that capital jurors take personal responsibility for the punishment decision. The article argues that this process blurs the lines between state and citizen action, solidifies the types of homicides that are designated worthy of capital punishment, and allows the state to neutralize some of the historic problems with state-sponsored death sentences.
State-Inflicted Death: Differing Approaches to the Death Penalty in Taiwan and Singapore
This paper seeks to examine why some countries have abolished the death penalty while others choose to keep it, given their popular opinions overwhelmingly favoring this tool to pursue justice. Taking Taiwan and Singapore as cases, this study demonstrates different approaches toward this controversial issue. In contrast to Singapore's self-confidence on exercising its sovereignty, Taiwan has been isolated from international society and thus has stronger incentives to use this issue as a means to attract attention and acknowledgement. Since bluntly abolishing the death penalty might encounter strong political opposition, the Taiwanese government has pursued this goal using a silent approach, i.e. by such administrative means as stopping approval of executions, rather than going through formal, symbolic legislation. By doing so the politicians and ruling party also benefit from gaining a reputation for good human rights records without triggering heated debates on this issue.
Why to Execute Death Penalty, or Not
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
Worldwide discussion and debate on this important subject of Death Penalty separated intellectual fraternity into two divisions and this discussion getting strong day by day giving birth to much more important questions nowadays, such as; whether there should be death penalty for murder or heinous crimes? Whether it served as deterrence in murder cases? If capital punishment is executed for heinous crimes or most serious crimes then why it should be given for a murder committed under unavoidable or inevitable circumstances? Empirical study shows that there are many cases where due to lack of information, lack of facilities of counsel, apprehension of wrong person caught etc. innocent persons executed for a crime which they never committed and murderer of same case remained still free due to execution of an innocent person. This would cause very severe loss to administration of justice and its cause.
Russia, the death penalty, and Europe: the ambiguities of influence
Post-Soviet Affairs, 2013
Studies of capital punishment worldwide investigate how international influence affects the death penalty. We analyze European influence on the death penalty in Russia over the imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods, using two parameters: the changing mechanisms of influence in each period and the death penalty’s significance in the broader spectrum of punitive violence. On the first parameter, in the tsarist period, European influence on Russian policy was “productive” – exercised through prestige, moral suasion, and “diffusion.” In the Soviet period, European influence was blocked. In the post-Soviet period, European influence is coercive, as the Council of Europe has unsuccessfully sought to compel Russia to abolish its death penalty. On the second parameter, the death penalty in Russia has always been only one of many forms of state-sanctioned punitive killing. In consequence, the Council’s involvement in Russia’s death penalty has produced an incoherent policy outcome and has entangledtheCouncilinRussia’sauthoritarianpolitics.Russiathusexemplifies the hazards of external involvement in death penalty abolition.
South Korea's De Facto Abolition of the Death Penalty
Pacific Affairs, 2009
... entire term. As a human rights lawyer, Roh used to represent political prisoners, and he himself participated in the pro-democracy June Struggle in 1987 against the dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan (Cho˘n Tu-hwan). Celebrating ...
This Article focuses on a major reform encouraged by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)—the abolition of the death penalty in Rwanda. For a decade prior to this reform, Rwandan courts had been imposing the death penalty in genocide cases. Using a qualitative empirical research method, still uncommon in international legal studies , the Article shows how the ICTR's requirements influenced the abolition , and then considers the impact of the abolition on national reconciliation in Rwanda. The findings suggest that the abolition has contributed to reconciliation, including through re-humanizing perpetrators and their relatives, improving survivors' perception of society, and inspiring both survivors and perpetrators to envision a shared future. This is remarkable considering that, during the debates on the ICTR's establishment, Rwanda insisted that sentencing genocide perpetrators to death was necessary for post-conflict justice and reconciliation. This Article thus sheds a new light on the relationship between international tribunals and national reconciliation. In particular, it suggests that international tribunals can advance national reconciliation (and thus attain one of their explicit goals) through encouraging domestic legal developments such as death penalty reforms. Moreover, by raising awareness of the abolition's positive effects on interethnic relations in Rwanda, the Article could inform debates about the future of capital punishment in other death penalty countries.