Focus: Death penalty in the 21st century

Focus: Death penalty in the 21st century

In the second half of the 20th century, there were many changes in death penalty policy worldwide. After the end of World War II and its atrocities, an abolitionist movement started in Western Europe. The first countries to abolish were Italy, Austria and Germany. They were later followed by Great Britain, Spain and France. After the last major power in Western Europe had abolished the death penalty, in 1981, the issue shifted from a question of criminal justice to a question of human rights and limits on government.

Since then, the number, scope and implementation strategies of international human rights treaties and conventions has increased. Among those treaties and conventions lies the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European...

Read more: The new frontier in abolishing the death penalty

Focus: Death penalty in the 21st century

French Romantic writer Victor Hugo once proclaimed "The death penalty is the essential and lasting symbol of of barbaric behaviour".

From a human evolution standpoint, the way we distinguish between modern civilisation and the barbaric past, is our respect for other humans and life. To kill is an extremely brutal act, regardless of the circumstances, the procedures gone through and by whom it is implemented. There is no way of masking the innate barbarism of killing.

Thus, the more civilised a culture becomes, the more we start to reflect on the death penalty. In the modern world with the International Human Rights Act, the trend is truly moving towards the abolishment of the death penalty. 139 of the world's 197 countries have...

Read more: A democratic society should not permit state violence!

Focus: Death penalty in the 21st century

Lin Hsinyi is the Executive Director of the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (TAEDP). In a gradual reaction to the cases of Zhou Xun-shan, Lu Cheng and Xu Zi-chiang, TEADP was established in 2003, and has been working towards abolition ever since, as well as helping appeal death row cases and offering support to relatives of those who have received a death sentence or who have already been executed. They are currently the most active group in Taiwan regarding the cessation of the death penalty and are also members of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty (WCADP) and the Anti Death Penalty Asia Network (ADPAN)

As a recognisable outspoken critic of the death penalty, Hsinyi often receives personal threats on her life and...

Read more: Leading the long road to abolition (TAEDP)

Focus: Death penalty in the 21st century

Ming C. Huang is the director of the Prison Fellowship in Taiwan. The prison fellowship gives counselling to various prisoners. They also look after victims and their families and try to fully reintegrate them into society . Of particular interest is that they give counselling to those on death row. This gives Ming a rare insight into prisoners that others may have completely given up on and provides a more accurate understanding of the individual issues and mindsets of each prisoner.

Read more: To harm is human, to forgive is divine

Focus: Death penalty in the 21st century

For the past 10 years Lu Ping and Lu Jing have been fighting to overturn the guilty verdict in the Chan Chun-tzu murder case. Their brother Lu Cheng was charged with the murder, and sentenced to death. On 7 September 2000 he was executed. The family found there were huge inadequacies with the case.  They argue that Lu Cheng was a brother, a father and a human being, thus the potential that he was unjustly executed brings the whole system of justice into disrepute. Here Lu Cheng's older sister's give their voice on what they see as a latent miscarriage of justice.



The spirit medium

From a foreigner's point of view, one of the strangest things in the case was the involvement of a sort of psychic, or from the Chinese 'spirit medium'...

Read more: The victims, the victims and the other victims

Focus: Death penalty in the 21st century

Growing up in a South Suburb of Chicago in the late 1980s, I first learned about the death penalty when the American serial killer, Ted Bundy, was put to death by the electric chair. Despite being young, his name and his awful crimes were something that I have always remembered.

Hours before his execution, a Christian Evangelist named Dr. James Dobson spoke with Bundy in a taped interview. Since the content was adult and dealt a lot with Bundy’s addiction to pornography, I never heard or saw anything from this interview, I just knew that a very sick and bad person was no longer around.

From this, my very impressionable mind was made up and I do believe my opinion on the death penalty was established. Since Dr. Dobson was a...

Read more: “Where sin abounded, Grace abounded all the more”

Focus: Death penalty in the 21st century

(Photo by Steve Snodgrass http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevensnodgrass/3589163710)

There are several arguments in support of the death penalty. The three most popular are that the death penalty deters crime, that it removes a criminal’s capacity for more crime, and/or that it is retribution for serious offenses. I contend that the death penalty’s deterrent effect is non-existent, that while it does incapacitate a criminal, this is not the primary reason for the continued existence of the death penalty.

The death penalty is, at root, retribution. It is a demonstration of the group’s power over the individual. In pre-modern societies, executions served to prevent blood feud and widening violence between families and clans. An...

Read more: Steak and Cobbler

Focus: Death penalty in the 21st century

Part of the reason why the subject of abolishing the death penalty has been reverberating around Taiwan can be attributed to Amnesty International.

It was in 1977 that the organisation took the decision to start campaigning to abolish the death penalty, since then they have formed a vast and influential international anti-death penalty movement. The death penalty has no crime deterrence benefits; there are often convictions of the innocent; death penalty is a barbarous act of revenge; these are all reasons provided by the organisation. There are both people that believe these arguments, and those that don’t, because it touches upon a subjective value dispute. However, the absolute line adopted by Amnesty in selling their agenda has...

Read more: Is abolishing the death penalty really a world trend?