Which Countries Use the Death Penalty?
This handy map from Wikimedia Commons shows how the world divides between countries with the death penalty (red), countries without (blue), countries that employ it only under rare “special circumstances” (green), and countries that legally retain the death penalty but have not used it in at least 10 years (orange).
Currently, Texas is defying international courts, the UN, and the Obama administration by denying Vienna Convention rights to a Mexican prisoner. Read more at The Atlantic.
I think this map does a fine job illustrating what fine company the US is in by continuing to allow this barbaric practice*.
* Side Note: I’d be interested in learning more about what “special circumstances” that some countries have in place are. I am anti-death penalty, but even I can think of a few circumstances in which I could understand. The masterminds behind genocide, or even someone like Timothy McVeigh for example.
I cannot speak of the “special circumstances” the world over, but I can tell you what those are in South America: a remnant of the 70’s to 90’s military dictatorships that plagued the continent (I’ll do my best not to sidetrack how, coincidentally, those dictatorships were funded and supported by the US, though). During those days, South American states had laws against treason and “acts of sedition against the state”. Argentina abolished them but other countries in the region haven’t yet. Also, some of those states keep them in case military attempts to seize power again, then the state could court martial those Officers and sentence them to death (potentially, you know), so that’s why they keep those laws in the books, even though in the majority of cases they have provisions against use on civilians.
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