A Year of Death by Disease. And Executions. The Case to End the Death Penalty

As of January 11, 2021, an entire year passed since the first COVID-19 death in Wuhan, China. As of early February 2021, the pandemic killed a total of 2,331,523 people worldwide since it began, and 462,272 people in the US alone.[1] It is true that tens of millions of people die from a variety of diseases worldwide every year.[2] However, in addition to the specified carnage of the coronavirus, the United States executed 20 people in the same span of time since COVID began: 7 state executions in 2020, 10 federal executions in 2020 and 3 in 2021.[3] Federal executions had not taken place in the US since 2003.[4] The 2020 numbers have yet to be totaled by leading watchdogs, but at least 657 executions took place across 20 countries worldwide in 2019. Although “[a]t least 26,604 people were known to be under sentence of death globally,” this was a five percent decrease from 2018.[5] The global call to end the death penalty has increased astronomically as revelations of its targeted injustice and calls for human rights arise.[6] Does this signal that countries and its citizens are trending towards the abolition of the death penalty?

Racial and Socio-economic Impact

The disparities of the death penalty inflicted on people of color, predominantly Black people in America, and indigent populations around the world are staggering. In the US’ 2020-2021 federal killing spree, six of the thirteen executions were of Black people (46%), one Native American person (8%), and six white people (46%).[7] Yet, Black people represent 12.2%, Native Americans 0.2%, and white people 60.1% of the US population respectively.[8] Throughout history and in the present moment, Black people are sentenced to death at astonishingly higher rates than their white counterparts, especially when the victim was white.[9]

This fatal disadvantage persists for people of low socio-economic status. According to one advocate “[t]here is no greater indictment of the death penalty than the way in which it victimizes the poorest among us.”[10] For example, more than 74% of death sentences in India “belong to the economically vulnerable population.” [11]  In Saudi Arabia, poor migrant workers are particularly impacted by the death penalty when compared to natives in the nation.[12]  And in the US, a 2007 report found that 95% of those on death row were indigent.[13] Executions in Iran also mainly impact poor populations. [14] In particular, drug-related crimes frequently result in death sentences and most often target impoverished carriers rather than actual drug dealers.[15] Although official Chinese statistics on its executions are kept secret, it handed down the majority of its death sentences to the unemployed or farmers in 2016.[16]

Methods of Abolition: Legislation and Courts

The majority of European countries have abolished the death penalty. In 1995, the European Court of Human Rights signed Protocol No. 6 abolishing the death penalty in peacetime.[17] Then in 2003, it signed Protocol No. 13 abolishing it for all circumstances.[18] As of 2019, 106 countries worldwide abolished the death penalty by law “for all crimes,” and an additional thirty-six countries abolished it in practice.[19] While 142 countries represent more than two-thirds of world States, fifty six (per source) still retain the death penalty.[20] In November 2020, 120 states voted for a United Nations resolution opposing the death penalty, while thirty nine countries voted against it.[21] Burkina Faso, the latest country to abolish the death penalty, did so for ordinary crimes in 2018 by its National Assembly introducing a new criminal code.[22] That same year, Malaysia imposed a temporary moratorium on executions and abolished mandatory death sentences, but declined to abolish the practice altogether.[23]

Albania’s Constitutional Court abolished the death penalty in 2000, finding it incompatible with its new constitution of 1998.[24] The Constitutional Court of Guatemala ruled in October 2017 that “ordinary” or civil crimes could not be punished by death.[25] Many US states are following suit. The Supreme Courts of Delaware and Washington each ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 2016 and 2018 respectively.[26] In February 2021, Virginia’s state legislature – the second most notorious death penalty state, behind Texas – voted to abolish capital punishment.[27]

End the Death Penalty

Calls to abolish the death penalty are not a new phenomenon. It is historically a large part of criminal justice reform initiatives. However, the past year was filled with an obscene amount of death and an international reckoning with racial injustice based on the unjust killings of Black and other people of color. It is a conscious choice to kill in a year plagued by excessive death. Instead, these countries should abolish the death penalty through action by their courts, legislation, or even just in practice.

Julia Tedesco is an Online Content Committee staff member of Fordham International Law Journal Volume XLIV.

This is a student blog post and in no way represents the views of the Fordham International Law Journal nor Tedesco’s employer.

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[1] See COVID-19 Dashboard, Johns Hopkins Univ. of Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center, https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html (last updated Feb. 7, 2021).

[2] See John Elflein, Leading causes of death worldwide in 2019, Statista (Jan. 27, 2021), https://www.statista.com/statistics/288839/leading-causes-of-death-worldwide/.

[3] See Executions List 2020, Death Penalty Information Center, https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/2020 (last updated Dec. 11, 2020); Executions List 2021, Death Penalty Information Center, https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/2021 (last updated Jan. 16, 2021).

[4] See Tom Jackman & Mark Berman, Despite recent federal flurry, number of U.S. executions is lowest since 1991, Wash. Post (Dec. 16, 2020), https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/12/16/us-executions-decline/.

[5] See Death penalty in 2019: Facts and figures, Amnesty Int’l (Apr. 21 2020), https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/04/death-penalty-in-2019-facts-and-figures/.

[6] See World Coalition, Death Penalty and Poverty 1 (2017) http://www.worldcoalition.org/media/resourcecenter/EN_WD2017_FactSheet.

[7] See Executions List 2020, supra note 3; Executions List 2021, supra note 3 (combining the two years).

[8] See Iman Ghosh, Visualizing the U.S. Population by Race, Visual Capitalist (Dec. 28, 2020) https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-u-s-population-by-race/.

[9] See generally Death Penalty and Race, Amnesty Int’l (May 18, 2017), https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-and-race/; Scott Phillips & Justin Marceau, Whom the State Kills (Univ. of Denver Legal Stud. Working Paper No. 19-16, 2020), https://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/07/07.30.2020-Phillips-Marceau-For-Website.pdf.

[10] Robin M. Maher, Poverty and the Death Penalty, Penal Reform Blog (Oct. 10, 2017), https://www.penalreform.org/blog/poverty-death-penalty/.

[11]See World Coalition, supra note 6 at 1.

[12] See id at 2.

[13]See id at 1.

[14] See World Day Against the Death Penalty: 435 Executions in Iran, Iran Human Rights (Oct. 10, 2017), https://iranhr.net/en/articles/3088/.

[15] See id.

[16] See Zheping Huang, China is most likely to execute a farmer, or someone who doesn’t have a job, Quartz (Apr. 10, 2017),  https://qz.com/953940/china-is-most-likely-to-execute-a-farmer-or-someone-who-doesnt-have-a-job/. 

[17] See The ECHR and the death penalty: a timeline, Council of Europe https://www.coe.int/en/web/portal/death-penalty, (last visited Feb. 7, 2021).

[18] See id.

[19] See Amnesty Int’l, Abolitionist and Retentionist Countries as of July 2018 1 https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/ACT5066652017ENGLISH.pdf. See also Death penalty in 2019, supra note 5.

[20] See id.

[21] See Asian Nations Reject UN Vote Against Death Penalty, Human Rights Watch (Nov. 24, 2020), https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/11/25/asian-nations-reject-un-vote-against-death-penalty.

[22] See Burkina Faso and the Death Penalty, Parliamentarians for Global Action https://www.pgaction.org/ilhr/adp/bfa.html, (last visited Feb. 7, 2021).

[23] See Malaysia to keep death penalty, but no longer mandatory, Channel News Asia (Mar. 13, 2019 8:30 PM), https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/malaysia-death-penalty-not-completely-abolished-11340612.

[24] See Roger Hood & Carolyn Hoyle, Abolishing the Death Penalty Worldwide: The Impact of a ‘New Dynamic,’ 38 Crime & Justice, 1, 11 (2009)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1086/599200.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A2e33ea46f23f556126dfc63a04796641; Albania executes the death penalty, Desert News (Dec. 11, 1999), https://www.deseret.com/1999/12/11/19479867/albania-executes-the-death-penalty.

[25] See Expediente 5986-2016, Constitutional Ct. of Guatemala, Oct. 24, 2017, https://leyes.infile.com/index.php?id=182&id_publicacion=76801. See Press Statement, Amnesty Int’l, Guatemala: court decision ruling death penalty unconstitutional for most crimes is a key step on path to full abolition (Nov. 7, 2017), https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/ACT5074122017ENGLISH.pdf.

[26]See generally Rauf v. State, 145 A.3d 430 (Del. 2016); State v. Gregory, 427 P.3d 621 (Wash. 2018).

[27] See CJ Paschall, Virginia House of Delegates votes to end death penalty, NBC 29 (Feb. 6, 2021), https://www.nbc29.com/2021/02/06/virginia-house-delegates-votes-end-death-penalty/.