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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 […]
Amrutanshu Dash - 16th September 2015
In what can be termed as a watershed moment in the fight against death penalty in India, the Law Commission in its 262nd report (‘2015 report’) has recommended the abolition of the death sentence for all offences except “terrorism related offences”. The Commission had earlier recommended retention of capital punishment in its 35th report (‘1967 […]
John Ehrett - 15th September 2015
The case of City of Los Angeles v. Contreras, currently up for first-round consideration before the Supreme Court of the United States, centres on an important question of criminal procedure: when is deadly force by law enforcement officers proportionally justified to restrain a fleeing suspect? Controlling legal precedent does exist regarding this issue: the 1985 […]
Mulawo Mwaba - 10th September 2015
Zambia, like most countries in Africa, has retained the death sentence on its criminal law statutes for a limited number of offences. Recently, though, and against the tide of death penalty abolitionism, the punishment is set to be further cemented in law by the Zambian Draft Constitution. This post outlines the legal provisions governing the […]