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The federal government executed thirteen individuals in the last seven months of the Trump administration. While American media discourse in 2020 was focused largely on other events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the presidential election, the news media nevertheless served as a key source of information about the executions to the American public. This study examines accounts of the executions from online news sources in order to identify the ways in which news outlets that lean to opposing ends of the political spectrum framed the executions. A thematic content analysis shows that the executions were discussed in the context of major events of the time, including the presidential election, the pandemic, and demonstrations calling for racial justice. News sources that lean to the political left tended to frame the executions as a political move by President Trump, who was backed by a conservative Supreme Court while neglecting more pressing issues like managing the pandemic. Right-leaning sources were more likely to frame the executions as overdue justice that had been unnecessarily delayed by frivolous lawsuits and baseless claims of racial injustice. Implications for public support and the future of capital punishment are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the recent repeal of the death penalty in Papua New Guinea and examines some potential implications for considerations to decriminalise same-sex sexual activity and sex work in the country. It considers that, while the repeal of the death penalty was a significant milestone for human rights domestically and internationally, the dominance of Christian morals evident in propelling the repeal deepens the challenge for law reform on issues of moral bearing, most notably the decriminalisation of same-sex sexual activity and sex work. The article further analyses the political conditions to conclude that for those considering law reform, there may be better prospects through the Supreme Court by way of a constitutional validity challenge than through the Parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Oriental Studies / Sarkiyat Mecmuasi is the property of Istanbul Universitesi Edebiyat Fakultesi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Mainland China and Taiwan are two significant regions currently executing the death penalty; especially, Mainland China alone is believed to implement an amount of executions even larger than the total of all other countries. However, although Mainland China and Taiwan share the Chinese language, as well as traditional culture, the public's opinions on the death penalty diverge. There is no evidence showing that more people are becoming abolitionists, albeit different social groups, domestic and overseas, are trying to propel the process of abolitionism. The public's opinions on the death penalty are highly influenced by various factors, including cultural and historical ones, which are considered to be fundamental. Besides, the media, the public's confidence in the judicial system, nationalism and international pressure also impact the public opinion. The governments of both Mainland China and Taiwan should take further actions in terms of the judicial system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the identities of judges on multimember courts interact with case context to influence judicial decision making. Specifically, I leverage variation in panel composition and defendant race to examine race-based panel effects in death penalty cases on the Courts of Appeals. Using a dataset that accounts for several characteristics of a defendant and his crime, I find that the assignment of a black judge to an otherwise all-nonblack panel substantially increases the probability that the panel will grant relief to a defendant on death row—but only in cases where the defendant is black. The size of the increase is substantively large: conditional on the defendant being black, a three-judge panel with a single African-American judge is about 23 percentage points more likely to grant relief than an all-nonblack panel. These results have important implications for assessing the role of racial diversity on the federal courts and contribute to the empirical literature on the application of the death penalty in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge, attitudes and beliefs of police officers are important in shaping public opinion on the death penalty. However, there is a paucity of research in the Caribbean on police officers' attitudes towards the death penalty and thus insufficient police scholarship on this topical issue. More specifically, there is a noticeable sparseness of scholarship on the death penalty using police recruits as proxies for such studies. As a result of this lacuna, the current study examined attitudes of police recruits towards the death penalty using a mixed-method approach to gather data on attitudes towards the death penalty as well as alternatives to the death penalty. Questionnaires were distributed to one hundred and seven individuals undergoing police recruit training at the Police Academy in Trinidad and Tobago. The data were distilled by gender, education level, marital status, and age range to determine attitudes towards the death penalty among the recruit population. The findings revealed: (1) high levels of support for the death penalty, (2) the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence for persons found guilty of murder, and (3) life imprisonment without the possibility of parole as the best alternative sentencing option to the death penalty. Three themes (consistent application of the death penalty, life imprisonment without parole, and murder only) emanated from the qualitative component of the instrument and these are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historia y Sociedad (01218417) is the property of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas y Economicas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper compares the personality traits of experienced Australian Police officers, as scored by the HEXACO, to their opinions regarding capital punishment. Results indicated that while experienced Australian Police opinions regarding the death penalty were overwhelmingly different to the opinions of United States of America (US) and United Kingdom (UK) police officers, with 81.1% of Australian police opposing the death penalty, Australian Police personality traits were consistent with Canadian and Dutch police (i.e., higher in Honesty Humility, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, and lower in Emotionality than the general population samples). The bindings challenge traditional views regarding police being prejudicial and severe. The paper recommends recruitment of police officers from more diverse groups to better represent the community they serve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociologia, Problemas e Práticas is the property of Centro de Investigacao e Estudos de Sociologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Collected Papers of Zagreb Law Faculty / Zbornik Pravnog Fakulteta u Zagrebu is the property of Sveuciliste u Zagrebu, Pravni Fakultet and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Pregled is the property of University of Sarajevo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The death penalty debate is the most generally relevant debate, keeping in mind the situation that has been brought about by today. Death penalty is an integral part of the Indian Criminal Justice System and of many other retentionist countries. This article argues that death penalty is a philosophical issue no doubt, but it also draws inspiration from Durkheim's discussion to the impact of political organization on penal evolution. It suggests that the most serious punishment i.e., death penalty is the first to grow milder; then to disappear with the progressive weakening of punishment. The author has drawn the conclusion with few suggestions at the end of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Vienna University's 1997/98 inquiry into the background of Eduard Pernkopf's anatomical atlas, German and Austrian anatomical institutes have been forced to confront their past, particularly the widespread procurement of bodies of victims of National Socialism. This paper focuses on the Anatomical Institute in Innsbruck, which received bodies from an unusually broad array of sources: from prisoners executed at Stadelheim Prison in Munich, prisoners of war from three different camps, military personnel sentenced to death by martial courts, patients from a psychiatric hospital, and several bodies of Jewish Holocaust victims. As in other comparable cases, these bodies were used for scientific publications and medical teaching until long after the war. The Anatomical Institute's collection is currently undergoing a detailed analysis in order to identify any human remains dating from the Nazi period. At the Institute of Histology and Embryology, recent research has led to the discovery of approximately 200 histological slides pertaining to at least five individuals who had been executed under the Nazi regime. In a number of cases, the specimens had been provided by Prof. Max Clara, head of the Leipzig Institute of Anatomy. This study is based on an analysis of the Innsbruck Anatomical Institute's unusually detailed records and numerous documents from various archives, including files pertaining to an inquiry into the institute held after the war by the French occupation authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews and endorses the book entitled "Taiwan and International Human Rights: A Story of Transformation." Among the thirty-seven chapters published in this book, the reviewer is very impressed by Chapter 2, written by Professor Cohen. Among the various chapters in Parts II to VI, this review would recommend those on transitional justice and national human rights institution, and death penalty, respectively. While the reviewer is supportive of the voluntary compliance approach taken by Taiwan, he nevertheless cautions against the imbalanced rights and obligations on Taiwan's international status, particularly in other fields such as international trade, environmental and fishery agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the penalty phase of capital trials, emotionally charged testimony can be presented about the loss of the victim (Victim Impact Statement; VIS) or the potential loss of the defendant (Execution Impact Statement; EIS). This experiment examined how these impact statements influence mock jurors' decisions while accounting for evidence strength using a 2 (VIS or no VIS) X 2 (EIS or no EIS) X 2 (high aggravator case or high mitigator case) between-subjects design. Overall, results suggest impact statements do not strongly influence jurors' decisions. In contrast, evidence strength and perceptions of the defendant strongly predicted jurors' weighing of aggravators and mitigators and their sentencing decisions. Implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors examine the relevance of international law and human rights for capital punishment practice throughout the world. The paper focuses particularly on the death penalty in the United States, and the authors explore whether actual capital punishment practice in the US is consistent with international law and deferential to human rights. That is, the paper does not limit itself to the death penalty in theory (e.g., is it right to kill a human being?), but also considers whether the death penalty as it is actually earned out in the US (i.e., rarely and selectively) meets the standards of international law and respects human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Faced with punishing severe offenders, why do some prefer imprisonment whereas others impose death? Previous research exploring death penalty attitudes has primarily focused on individual and cultural factors. Adopting a functional perspective, we propose that environmental features may also shape our punishment strategies. Individuals are attuned to the availability of resources within their environments. Due to heightened concerns with the costliness of repeated offending, we hypothesize that individuals tend towards elimination-focused punishments during times of perceived scarcity. Using global and United States data sets (studies 1 and 2), we find that indicators of resource scarcity predict the presence of capital punishment. In two experiments (studies 3 and 4), we find that activating concerns about scarcity causes people to increase their endorsement for capital punishment, and this effect is statistically mediated by a reduced willingness to risk repeated offenses. Perceived resource scarcity shapes our punishment preferences, with important policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the persistence of structural racism in America, non-whites are more likely to experience hardships related to their race or ethnicity that are relevant to capital mitigation than whites are. Yet, the color-blind ideology of post-Civil Rights America suggests that capital litigators would avoid explicitly addressing racial and ethnic inequality in their mitigation cases, but there has never been a systematic study examining this possibility. This study begins to fill this gap by utilizing an exploratory qualitative content analysis of available capital penalty trial transcripts over an 11-year period in New Castle County, Delaware, to analyze whether capital defense attorneys do, in fact, explicitly discuss racial or ethnic inequality in their mitigation cases or whether they discuss inequality and disadvantage in a purely color-blind fashion. The findings reveal that defense attorneys never explicitly broached the topic of racial inequality, but they did talk about other forms of structural inequality, such as economic deprivation and violent communities. These findings suggest that color-blind ideology does infect capital mitigation, a reality that places non-white defendants at a further disadvantage in capital penalty proceedings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The modern debate over death penalty abolition in Sub-Saharan Africa frequently references the precolonial period. Has the death penalty truly existed since time immemorial, or is it largely a European imposition? The extent to which precolonial societies used capital punishment is difficult to discern, as many of the anthropological and legal sources that document this period were influenced by colonialism. These sources nonetheless show that the use of capital punishment in the precolonial period was tied to notions of political authority and the spirit world, though legal procedures and even methods of execution varied enormously among societies. This article considers the reliability problems of the extant sources and attempts to make tentative conclusions as to the existence of the death penalty prior to the onset of European rule, bearing in mind that these conclusions are not exhaustive or even necessarily representative of the continent's diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article maps the presence of capital punishment in Baudelaire. It locates and dates the occurrences of the death penalty and its imaginaire, by identifying, first, this nebula in portraits of the author himself, various unfinished projects, and prose texts. Secondly, Baudelaire's poems are shown to explore the aesthetic, moral, anthropological and symbolic ramifications of lethal justice. Thirdly, his provocative defense of State killing in prose fragments and Mon Coeur mis à nu is examined. This cartography finally turns to the integration of Baudelaire’s ‘capital imaginary’ into the history of his works, his conception of them, and his self-representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the commonly held belief that atimia in its earliest Greek usage meant exile, arguing instead that atimia and outlawry were always two entirely distinct, though not mutually exclusive, concepts. It is often claimed that atimia originated as a penalty of death or exile, but that over time its harshness became modified so that those who suffered under its restrictions could not be killed or assaulted with impunity. A careful study of the evidence will show that atimia never meant outlawry, and moreover, its archaic cognates do not imply that in early times to lose timê was the same as losing membership in a political community. Rather, atimazesthai entailed the loss of social honour and status which was an all-encompassing value in the aristocratic societies of archaic Greece. Atimia in the Classical period is similarly a loss of rights (timai), and because penalties and conditions such as exile and outlawry can be easily described, in Greek, as involving the loss of prerogatives (timai), they are conceptually forms of atimia. However, in the legal language of democratic Athens atimia is and always was something distinct from exile, and this legal distinction went back to the very earliest times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Athena: Filosofijos studijos is the property of Lithuanian Culture Research Institute and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista da Faculdade de Letras: História is the property of Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Letras and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

According to Bowers' ‘spuriousness theory,’ people only support the death penalty because they believe that the currently available alternative punishments are insufficiently harsh or meaningful. I test his theory by estimating the relationship between Americans' perceptions of prisons and their support for the death penalty using data drawn from a national, random sample of the US population. I find that people who perceive prison environments to be insufficiently harsh are also more likely to support the death penalty and less likely to support the alternative punishment of life imprisonment without parole. The relationship between people's perceptions of prison and their support for the death penalty is robust even controlling for their symbolic beliefs and demographic characteristics. I discuss the implications of these findings for theories of public opinion about punishment, capital sentencing, and the politics of criminal justice in the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the reign of National Socialism (NS) anatomical institutes regularly received bodies of executed prisoners in steadily increasing numbers. After 1939, the execution site at Stadelheim prison in Munich supplied not only Munich anatomy but also the institutes in Erlangen, Innsbruck and Würzburg. Due to the disappearance of the Munich body journals, the exact dimension and procedure of body procurement from Stadelheim remained unknown for 70 years. After consultation of a wide range of sources, including rediscovered fragments of the body journals, it is now possible to give an almost comprehensive account of the developments. This article deals with the attempts at recovering information on body procurement from Stadelheim prison during the NS period, which already indicated the significance of Munich anatomy in organizing the distribution of bodies. Thereafter, it addresses the number and distinct groups of Stadelheim prisoners, executed and delivered to the four anatomical institutes, the differences in the handling of their bodies, and the extent to which in particular Munich anatomy profited from the massive increase in executions. Finally, it unveils the role of the Munich Anatomical Institute in distributing those bodies among the anatomies during the Second World War, making it not only the main beneficiary but also the interim center of this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tempo (1413-7704) is the property of Universidade Federal Fluminense, Departamento de Historia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revue d'Histoire Moderne & Contemporaine is the property of Societe d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Historia y Politica: Ideas, Procesos y Movimientos Sociales is the property of Departamento De Historia del Pensamiento y de los Moviemientos Sociales y Politicos (Madrid) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)