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Alice Storey - 21st January 2017
Prior to the election of Donald Trump, death penalty abolitionists were quietly confident that capital punishment was nearing its inevitable end in the United States. The number of executions has been falling year-on-year; in 2015 the US executed 28 people, a relatively low number when compared with the 60 executions which took place in 2005. […]
Elizabeth King - 2nd December 2016
In the first case to prosecute crimes against culture as war crimes, the Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) found Mr Al Mahdi — a member of Ansar Dine — guilty of the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against religious and historic buildings in Timbuktu in 2012. This case represents the recognition […]
Tosin Osasona - 24th October 2016
The failure of Nigerian criminal justice institutions and agencies to prevent mob justice or punish those who engage in it, has lent an air of acceptability to the vile practice. Although there is no mob justice victim or incidence database; or a systematic information gathering system on the theme, there is regular media reporting of cases […]
Elizabeth King - 28th September 2016
A landmark case for international law is currently before the International Criminal Court (ICC), where the destruction of cultural heritage in Timbuktu is being tried as a war crime under the Rome Statute for the first time. The judgment could significantly broaden the scope for prosecutors to investigate and punish acts detrimental to humanity around the […]
Josh Tuttle - 9th September 2016
In KRJ, the Supreme Court of Canada tackled the retrospective application of criminal sanctions on certain sexual offenders. In particular, whether or not sentencing legislation could be applied to an offender when it was not the law of Canada at the time the offences were actually committed. The accused in this case pleaded guilty to […]
Mai Sato - 7th July 2016
On 3 February 2016, the State of Georgia executed a 72 year old man – Brandon Astor – by lethal injection. Astor was convicted of killing a convenience store manager in 1979 and spent 36 years on death row. It has also been reported that Astor was showing signs of dementia in his last years […]
Aimee Ongeso and Alex Dyzenhaus - 4th May 2016
In the wake of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) decision to drop charges against the Deputy President of Kenya, William Ruto, and a radio host, Joshua arap Sang, we must re-examine the process of their initial indictment and trial. While we believe that Ruto and Sang (as well as the initial co-accused, including the sitting […]
Marie Manikis and Kaitlyn O’Shaughnessy - 19th April 2016
Another day another mandatory minimum struck down. In Lloyd, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that a one-year mandatory minimum sentence that applied to drug trafficking offenders with a prior conviction was a cruel and unusual punishment contrary to section 12 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The use of Charter litigation was reaffirmed […]
Valena Beety - 8th March 2016
Throughout his thirty-year service on the United States Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia questioned whether criminal defendants who maintained their innocence should be entitled to a second chance. Indeed, in the innocence community, he is most notably remembered for valuing expediency and finality above proof of innocence and exoneration proceedings. In his words, “This Court […]
Vikram Aditya Narayan - 26th January 2016
Last month the Supreme Court of India took a regressive step by affirming a 2008 decision (Swamy Shradhanand) in the case of V. Sriharan v. Union of India. In the 2008 decision, the Supreme Court had held that, in certain cases, a person may be sentenced to life imprisonment which may be placed beyond the […]
Elise Maes - 10th November 2015
On 1 October 2015, the UN Human Rights Council (‘UNHRC’) in Geneva adopted a resolution on capital punishment (‘the resolution’) drafted by Belgium. Belgium took the initiative to draft the resolution together with Benin, Costa Rica, France, Mexico, Mongolia, Moldova and Switzerland. After 26 countries voted in favour of the resolution, a high level panel […]
Catherine Appleton - 6th October 2015
Life imprisonment is a harsh sanction that is used in most countries in the world. Evidence from treaty bodies, such as the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, suggests that in many countries life sentence prisoners are subject to special regimes that are so restrictive that they are inherently inhuman and degrading. Life sentence […]