Death Penalty Waning

Essay by xray777 May 2010

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TABLE 1. Comparison of Abolitionist and Retentionist Countries

Year

Complete Abolitionist

Abolitionist for ordinary offences

Total Retentionist

Total countries

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

No.

1988

35

19

17

9

128

71

180

1995

60

31

13

7

119

62

192

2001

75

39

14

7

105

54

194

2008

104

52

35

18

58

29

197

Source: The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective; Infoplease

Death Penalty Waning

Death is the inevitable consequence of life that all accepts, but when it is deliberately delivered before its due, it is hard for everyone to agree. For that reason and more, the death penalty has been a debated issue for as long as its existence. However, as the epoch turns into the second millennium, the capital punishment languished while humanity flourished.

"Capital punishment is in decline as the twentieth century nears its end" (Hains 5), this phenomenon is evident in Hood's research of death penalty in a global perspective.

Dividing the world's various nations into "abolitionists" and "retentionists", enough data was collected to form the conclusion of the decline in the practice of death penalty. Abolitionist, which refers to countries that abolished the death penalty, grew considerably in number while retentionists, the countries still exercising death penalty, found themselves to be more the minority with each passing year. From TABLE 1 we can see that in 1988 death penalty is a common practice and more than 70% of the countries worldwide punished criminals with death sentences. However, as the statistics show, the numbers of abolitionist countries grew so profusely that in 2009 the situation is reversed, bringing abolitionists up to more than half of the total countries and retentionists a mere 29%. On top of that, an additional

TABLE 2.

Convicts Under Death Sentence...