Death penalty in decline
If current trends continue, the death penalty may be eliminated worldwide as early as 2026. That’s according to a visiting fellow at Harvard. “It’s not a feel-good topic,” said Christof Heyns during a panel on Monday. “But it is also not simply gloom and doom.” Heyns was among six experts who participated in “The Death Penalty: Hanging by a Thread,” a conversation about the global fate of what he called “systematic and organized violence by the state.” The event, in a packed classroom in Griswold Hall, was co-sponsored by the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program and Amnesty International USA. It came on day one of a two-day international conference on the death penalty at Harvard Law School (HLS). Heyns, a South African legal scholar and human rights activist, is a visiting fellow at HLS, and the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. In October, he will submit a...