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01 / 05
Capital Punishment Has Declined Dramatically

Blog Post | Overall Mortality

Capital Punishment Has Declined Dramatically

The death penalty used to be the norm for most countries around the world, today just a handful of authoritarian countries account for almost all state executions.

An image of a person being prepared to be executed by the guillotine.

According to press reports, Saudi Arabian prosecutors will be seeking the death penalty for five of the 11 suspects who stand accused of killing The Washington Post contributing journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October of last year. Amnesty International notes that Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most prolific executioners. Of the 993 reported executions that took place in 2017, the Gulf state was responsible for 146 of them – just under 15 per cent of the global total for the year.

The grisly murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi notwithstanding, the use of the death penalty has been falling since the second half of the 19th century and relatively few countries partake in the practice today. Let’s have a brief look at the history of the death penalty and the reasons for its declining use.

Since time immemorial, people have suffered capital punishment for a plethora of crimes – real and imagined. The Bible, for example, commands the death penalty for murder, kidnapping, attacking or cursing one’s parents, sacrificing one’s child to Moloch, willful negligence, sorcery, being a medium or spiritist, breaking the Sabbath, sacrificing to idol gods, blaspheming against God, false prophecy, giving false testimony in a capital case, adultery, incest, rape of a betrothed or married woman, homosexuality, bestiality, prostitution, pretending to be a virgin, and so on and so on.

As late as the 18th century, the British legal system included no fewer than 222 capital crimes. The Black Act of 1723 alone created 50 capital offences for such crimes as shoplifting and stealing of sheep, cattle and horses. According to Professor John H. Langbein from Yale University, before the death penalty for theft was abolished in 1832, “English law was notorious for prescribing the death penalty for a vast range of offenses as slight as the theft of goods valued at twelve pence.” (the equivalent of about $4 today).

Types of executions included beheading, burning, crushing, boiling to death, impalement, hanging, being broken on the wheel, sawing and crucifixion. Drawing and quartering was usually reserved for regicides such as François Ravaillac, who assassinated the French King Henry IV in 1610. As the British historian Alistair Horne noted, before being disemboweled and torn apart by four horses, Ravaillac “was scalded with burning Sulphur, molten lead and boiling oil and resin, his flesh then being torn by pincers.”

It’s no coincidence that the guillotine was introduced during the French Revolution to make death relatively quick and painless. The thinkers whose writings inspired the revolt favoured a more proportionate, rational and humane justice system. Voltaire, for instance, opposed punishment for violations of religious dogma. Montesquieu wanted punishment to fit the crime and opposed the use of torture. Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham opposed capital punishment outright, reasoning that life behind bars was a greater deterrent to heinous crimes than summary execution.

As the ideas of the Enlightenment spread, punishment became less gruesome and the number of capital offences dwindled. In the United Kingdom alone, the number of capital offences fell from 222 to four in the first half of the 19th century. Society did not suddenly become more chaotic as a result. On the contrary, as Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker showed in his 2012 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, violence decreased. As such, reform-minded governments felt emboldened to go further and abolish the death penalty altogether.

Venezuela led the way with the abolition of capital punishment in 1863. Other states followed, though it took another century, before the abolitionist movement really took off in the 1960s. In 2017, Amnesty International noted that “106 countries (a majority of the world’s states) had abolished the death penalty in law for all crimes and 142 countries (more than two-thirds) had abolished the death penalty in law or practice.”

That year, only 23 countries are known to have carried out the death penalty. Of the reported 993 executions, 84 per cent took place in just four countries – Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan. However, the above number does not include China, which is likely to have executed more people than all the other countries put together. According to Amnesty International, “the true extent of the use of the death penalty in China is unknown as this data is classified as a state secret; the global figure … excludes the thousands of executions believed to have been carried out in China.”

Looking on the bright side, the death penalty is now a relative rarity, concentrated for the most part in a handful of authoritarian countries. On the other hand, a decline in total state executions is unlikely to happen until we see fundamental political reform in some of the world’s most illiberal countries.

This first appeared in CapX.

World Health Organization | Mental Health

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“Between 2000 and 2021, the global age-standardized suicide rate dropped by 35%. The decreases varied by WHO region: 3% in Africa, 26% in South-East Asia, 30% in the Eastern Mediterranean, 48% in Europe and 50% in the Western Pacific (Fig. 10). The only region with an increase was the Americas, where the age-standardized suicide rate rose by 17% in the same time period. The global rate also decreased for age-group specific suicide rates (i.e. 15-29 years, 30-49 years, 50-69 years, and 70+ years) in the same time period.”

From World Health Organization.

BMC Health Services Research | Health Systems

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The drone delivery company Zipline is transforming healthcare in Ghana by ensuring fast and reliable access to medical supplies. According to a recent study, healthcare facilities in Ghana’s Ashanti Region that gained access to Zipline’s drone delivery service saw maternal deaths fall by 56.4 percent.

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World Health Organization | Pregnancy & Birth

Maternal Mortality Dropped Significantly from 2000 and 2023

“Between 2000 and 2023, the maternal mortality ratio (MMR, number of maternal deaths per 100 000 live births) dropped by about 40% worldwide…

eastern Europe and southern Asia achieved the greatest overall reduction in maternal mortality ratio (MMR): a decline of 75% (from an MMR of 38 to 9) and 71% (from an MMR of 405 down to 117), respectively. Despite its very high MMR in 2023, sub-Saharan Africa also achieved a substantial reduction in MMR of 40% between 2000 and 2023.

The greatest reduction in lifetime risk of maternal death during this period occurred in the region of central and southern Asia, with an 83% fall in risk from 1 in 71 in 2000 to 1 in 410 in 2023. In five regions, the lifetime risk of maternal mortality reduced by more than half: sub-Saharan Africa, northern Africa and western Asia, Australia and New Zealand, eastern and south-eastern Asia, and Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand).”

From World Health Organization.

UNICEF | Overall Mortality

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“In 2023, the global under-five mortality rate was half of what it was in 2000 – a remarkable achievement that reflects decades of sustained investment and collaboration by governments, donors, health professionals, communities and families…

Progress has not been uniform across all age groups. Since 2000, deaths among children aged 1–59 months have fallen by 58 per cent, compared to a 44 per cent decline in neonatal deaths. Nearly half of all under-five deaths in 2023 occurred within the first 28 days of life, underscoring the heightened vulnerability of newborns and the need for greater investment in targeted interventions during this critical period.”

From UNICEF.