THE USE OF THE DEATH PENALTY IN 2020
“A modern system of criminal justice must be reasonably accurate, fair, humane, and timely. Our recent experience with the Federal Government’s resumption of executions adds to the mounting body of evidence that the death penalty cannot be reconciled with those values.” Stephen Breyer, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, 16 July 20201
GLOBAL TRENDS The year 2020 was marked by a further global decline in the use of the death penalty, and while the Covid-19 pandemic contributed to reductions in the number of executions carried out and death sentences imposed, it also exacerbated the inherent cruelty of this punishment. The number of known executions decreased by 26% compared to the 2019 total, continuing the year-on-year reduction recorded since 2015 and once again reaching the lowest figure in more than 10 years. The number of known executing countries (18) decreased by 2 compared to 2019 and confirmed that the resort to executions remained confined to a minority of countries. The significant drop was primarily linked to important reductions in executions in two of the countries that have historically reported high execution figures, Iraq and Saudi Arabia; and to a lesser extent some hiatuses that took place in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In the USA, the surge in federal executions was balanced out in the national count mostly because of new stays of execution – or slower pursuit of warrants – in some US states, as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic. Six of the judicial reprieves granted in the USA in 2020 specifically referred to the Covid-19 pandemic. In Singapore executions were put on 1
US Supreme Court, Barr v. Purkey, (591 US 2020), 16 July 2020, dissenting opinion.
DEATH SENTENCES AND EXECUTIONS Amnesty International
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