A recent news item from Cornell University points out that recent grants from The Atlantic Philanthropies include $3.25 million for for Cornell Law School’s International Center on Capital Punishment that will help, “sustain [the] Death Penalty Worldwide, a free online database on different laws and practices in countries and territories where capital punishment is still in place.”
In their own words:
The database provides easy access to data regarding the practices and laws of individual countries, and permits users to search across jurisdictions to compare state practice in a wide variety of areas. Locating reliable data on many issues relating to the death penalty is notoriously difficult—particularly for qualitative questions, such as the competence of capital defense counsel. Even more prosaic questions, such as whether national courts have issued significant decisions relating to the application of the death penalty, are not easy to answer in countries that rarely publish judicial decisions. For those countries that treat information regarding the death penalty as a state secret, it is particularly challenging to find objective and reliable sources regarding death row demographics and execution practices. When a definitive conclusion cannot be reached, our research sets out the available information and offers a cautious, informed assessment of state practice. To ensure that database users can gauge the accuracy of our information, we provide sources for each fact cited in the database.
About Gary Price
