This chapter discusses the process leading up to, during, and after the execution of the three perpetrators of the Dongo killings. Information about the preparations which took place during the few days between the sentencing and the executions comes from a final accounting of the costs of the trial process. Lucero and other court officials made a special point of acknowledging the difficult work accomplished by a number of people over the course of the two weeks between the crime and the execution. Many worked through “sleepless nights” on this “anguishing process.”

Palace guardsman José Gómez Moreno started his diary with anecdotes relating to the strange occurrences which seemed to happen so frequently in late eighteenth-century Mexico City. Freak accidents, fires, murders, kidnappings, and assaults were not uncommon. While he certainly showed a fascination for the oddities of the day – from balloons to the viceroy’s wig – the halberdier paid special attention to the 246 executions that he witnessed over the course of twenty-two years, an average of just over eleven per year. Some years saw more hangings, garrotings, and burnings than others. Annual executions peaked in 1790, with a total of thirty-two in the first full year of Viceroy Revillagigedo’s reign.

This chapter discusses the right to life and the prohibition of the death penalty as laid down in the European Convention on Human Rights, in Council of Europe instruments, in EU law and in international instruments. It also pays attention to matters such as the beginning and end of life and preventive and investigative positive obligations. In the final section, a short comparison between the different instruments is made.

The Introduction gives a snapshot of the current status of capital punishment around the globe. It gives current statistics from Amnesty International and describes Amnesty International's anti-death penalty campaign in the 1970s that led to the Declaration of Stockholm, which expressed "total and unconditional opposition to the death penalty." The Introduction describes the divide between retentionist and abolitionist countries, highlighting countries that have outlawed capital punishment in their constitutions or through judicial rulings. After detailing how the death penalty was traditionally seen as something other than torture, the Introduction discusses the law's evolving nature--and how the death penalty is increasingly seen as a torturous and cruel punishment that violates human dignity and fundamental human rights. Noting that death sentences are no longer treated as a "lawful sanction" in many locales, the Introduction describes how the U.N. General Assembly has voted on multiple occasions for a global moratorium on executions. The Introduction summarizes the current state of international law as regards capital punishment and previews the book's content.

In its study of customary IHL, the ICRC determined that the elderly are entitled to special respect and protection in armed conflict. Under the 2002 Madrid Declaration, States pledged to protect and assist older persons in situations of armed conflict and foreign occupation. But overall, there remains a remarkable dearth of practical guidance on assistance to the elderly during situations of armed conflict.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex (LGBTI) persons are at particular risk of being targeted in situations of violence because of their gender or sexual preference. Discrimination against LGBTI persons could be based on sexual orientation (to whom someone is attracted); gender identity (how people define themselves, irrespective of biological sex), gender expression (how gender is expressed, through clothing, hair, or make-up), or sex characteristics (for example, genitals, chromosomes, reproductive organs, or hormone levels). The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions has observed that LGBTI persons are especially vulnerable to extrajudicial killings. The prohibition on executing LGBTI persons on the basis of their gender or sexual identity is not only a customary rule, but it is also a peremptory norm of international law.

While women face a myriad of threats to their physical well-being in any situation of armed conflict, there is a particularly heightened risk of sexual or gender-based violence, including rape. Armed conflict, including military occupation, often leads to increased prostitution, trafficking in women, and sexual assault of women, which demands specific protective and punitive measures. Within the UN system, the position of Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict was established by UN Security Council Resolution in 2009 to serve as the UN spokesperson and political advocate on conflict-related sexual violence.

Australian indigenous peoples are among the world’s most incarcerated populations. The nineteenth century origins of this fact lie in Australian legal histories, of the interaction of indigenous peoples and British criminal law introduced in the course of colonisation. This chapter considers first the assertion of criminal jurisdiction in law and statute in the early nineteenth century, paying attention to some significant differences between the colonies. Second, we look at some elements of criminal trial, including the treatment of Aboriginal evidence and the role of interpreters. Third, the chapter examines the importance of the criminal justice system’s putative concern with victimisation and the justice due to victims. Finally we consider some evidence about the system-wide impacts of the assertion of criminal jurisdiction over indigenous peoples, including patterns of prosecution and punishment. Understanding these legal histories makes clear how the legal system’s professed principles of justice and fairness compounded discrimination and disadvantage.

Argued October 15, 1986.Decided April 22, 1987.

Rehearing Denied June 8, 1987.

BARNES, J. delivered the opinion of the Court. Powell, J. joined in all but Part II. Rehnquist J. filed a dissenting opinion, in which O’Connor, Scalia, and White joined.

Defendant McCleskey filed a writ of habeas corpus in the Northern District of Georgia challenging a 1979 murder conviction and death sentence imposed in Fulton County, Georgia. The petition, which the District Court and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals denied, questions whether statistical evidence from research studies that strongly suggest racial considerations factor into capital sentencing jury deliberations, provides a basis to determine the petitioner’s sentence was unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment or Fourteenth Amendment. We now reverse those decisions based on empirical data strongly corroborating a significant risk exists that McCleskey’s sentence involved unconstitutional race discrimination in violation of both the Eighth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment.

This chapter offers a history of solitary confinement as a disciplinary technique, which emerged in the late eighteenth century as a replacement for the chaotic and degrading spectacle of corporal punishment. Key to that history are the ‘separate’ and the ‘silent’ regimes, whose most influential exponents were in the US, at prisons in Philadelphia (Eastern State) and New York (Auburn). The chapter uses the figure of the chaplain, and the inventive ways prisoners circumvented controls on their speech and inspection of their souls, to contextualise the solitude and introspection of the Romantic lyric. These contexts are rendered much more specific in readings of Wordsworth’s poetry of solitude and of penal discipline, and his evolution from the compassionate friend of ‘The Convict’ in Lyrical Ballads to the patron of capital punishment in his ‘Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death’.

The international community is moving towards the abolition of the death penalty but executions continue to lawful in a number of countries under certain circumstances where a crime of murder has been perpetrated at the issue of a fair trial. The mandatory death sentence is, however, always arbitrary. Those under 18 years of age at the time of the commission of the crime may not be lawfully sentenced to death and pregnant women may not be executed. The legality of executing persons with disabilities or older persons is also assessed. Finally, the death penalty in connection with an armed conflict is considered.

Persons with disabilities have been described by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the largest minority group in the world. This chapter describes the content and protection of the right to life of persons with disabilities under international law. It considers the legalities of imposing and executing the death penalty on persons with disabilities, as well as the protection of persons with disabilities in situations of armed conflict and natural disasters. Attention is paid to the particular vulnerabilities of women, girls, boys, and the elderly with disabilities to violence and abuse as well as the threats in law enforcement settings to all persons with disabilities.

Emil Stanisław Rappaport took part in the major international debates concerning criminalization of international crimes and at the same time he had an opportunity to introduce all discussed concepts in law of the reborn state. The first part of the chapter focuses on the early years of Rappaport’s academic career and the influence on him of the sociological school of criminal law. Rappaport’s work as a defence attorney and its impact on his further research on criminal enforcement law is discussed. The second part is devoted to Rappaport’s contribution to the development of a legal system and court system in the newly independent Republic of Poland (he considered the Codification Committee as a laboratory of modern legislation, a belief shared by the Association internationale de droit pénal). The third part presents Rappaport’s efforts in various international associations of criminal lawyers, and his work towards the unification of criminal laws worldwide and towards the establishment of the foundations of international criminal law. The final part discusses the period during and after World War II, when Rappaport had to face the challenges of bringing Nazi criminals to justice while dealing with the spread of Soviet influence across the Polish judiciary and academia.

A transnational legal ordering (TLO) has emerged and settled since 1945 around capital punishment. In contrast with transnational legal orders in other domains of criminal justice, the death penalty TLO regulates activity that is not transnational but rather national or local. The analysis therefore explains abolition in domestic law, confronting the question of how abolition can occur domestically when publics almost universally favor retention. Two types of domestic institutions can make non-majoritarian death penalty abolition more likely: (1) proportional representation in the legislature and (2) courts that are independent of the political branches. Transnational influences can also enhance the likelihood of abolition, in particular, (1) the incentive of membership in regional organizations, and (2) the persuasive and socializing influence of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). This chapter offers a novel means of measuring INGO influence and incorporates it in the analysis of data from about 150 countries. The analysis finds that proportional representation electoral systems, country-specific INGO attention, and regional effects increase the likelihood that a country will abolish the death penalty in a given period. Brief case studies illustrate the mechanisms highlighted by the broader analysis, including instances of both abolishers and non-abolishers.

Massive IQ gains over time showed that obsolete norms had inflated estimates of the effects of intervention, adoption, and aging; and misdiagnosis of whether individuals had met IQ cutting lines that affected everything from the administration of the death penalty to who should benefit from special education. There were also important studies cited in the literature as if they could be taken at face value – the adoption study by Skodak and Skeels, for example. In America, obsolete norms had turned the death penalty into a lottery: you survive if you took a current test and got sixty-eight; you die if you took an obsolete test and got seventy-five. Research on the causes of IQ gains showed that environmental factors had a potency hitherto unappreciated, illuminated the history of cognitive progress in the twentieth century and its social significance, and recast the debate about group differences in IQ.

Justice Antonin Scalia was a towering figure in jurisprudence and legal culture. Among other things, he was the most eloquent and prominent proponent of the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its “original meaning.” Scalia was also a devout Christian: a traditional Catholic who set forth his Christian beliefs with honesty, pungency, and wit. He frequently told the story how during his college oral examinations, he was asked the most significant event in history; he answered, the Battle of Waterloo, whereupon the professor “shook his head sadly and said, ‘No, Mr. Scalia. The Incarnation.’” The lesson for the young Scalia: “[Never] separate your religious life from your intellectual life.” Yet this most publicly devout justice also frequently made clear that his beliefs had nothing to do with his judicial role. His job, he emphasized, was merely to apply the meaning of the text without regard to policy considerations or moral values, including religious values. “I’m a worldly judge,” he often said. This presents a puzzle: did Scalia end up separating his religious life from his jurisprudence, the core of his intellectual life? Or was he still somehow a distinctively Christian judge? The solution, I suggest, lies in distinguishing his first-order legal conclusions, which were driven largely (although not solely) by his positivist judicial method, from his second-order choice of that method, which may well have reflected aspects of his personal outlook on the world, including his faith.