WHEN JUSTICE John Paul Stevens retired from the US supreme court in June after 35 years, he confessed that there was only one vote that he still regrets. In Gregg v Georgia, in 1976, he was part of the majority that allowed the restoration of the death penalty after nearly a decade without it. In 2008, in another judgment, he acknowledged his conversion to the abolitionist cause: "I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty represents the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes".
However, there is no real prospect yet that the supreme court will accept his civilised insight – last year the US imposed 110 death penalties and executed 46 (down six on 2009). At year-end, 3,200 occupied death row, and yet, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre, there have been 138 exonerations of death-row inmates since 1973. It is a brutal record that places the US fifth in the league of executioners behind such champions of rights as China (unknown thousands), Iran (252), North Korea (60) and Yemen (53), and ahead of Saudi Arabia (27) and Libya (18).
In such company is it fair to single out the US for special mention? Well, yes, if only because the US, as a member of the club of democracies, ostensibly committed to universal rights standards, expects to be judged by a different yardstick. So be it. On this issue, it is so egregiously out of step with the 139 states that have abolished capital punishment.
According to Amnesty International's Death Sentences and Executions in 2010, however, the global trend continues to lean towards abolition – 31 states abolished it in law or in practice in the last decade. Last year Gabon joined them and four more are considering it.
In the 527 executions carried out in 23 states, a grisly catalogue of means remains in use, from beheading, electrocution, hanging, lethal injection, to shooting. And while no “legal” executions by stoning were recorded in 2010, in Nigeria, Pakistan and Iran, at least 10 women and four men currently await this fate. A temporary halt was called to US executions when Italy and then Britain banned the export of a drug used for lethal injections – states have since found alternatives and resumed killing.
The death penalty is also still in worryingly widespread use for lesser, non-violent, and some political offences, although slow progress is being made persuading retentionists to raise the threshold. China scrapped it for 13 non-violent crimes, including smuggling historic relics and tax fraud-related offences, but retains it for 55 offences. A significant proportion of the executions or death sentences in 2010 in China, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, Yemen and Thailand were for drug-related offences – in the latter case, nearly half of its 708-strong death row. In Pakistan, while no one has actually been executed for blasphemy, there have been over 30 blasphemy-associated vigilante assassinations of politicians or accused. Uganda is considering capital punishment for “aggravated” homosexuality.