The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia (Studies in Crime and Public Policy) - Softcover

Johnson, David T

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195382455 ISBN 13: 9780195382457

Publisher: Oxford University Press, U.S.A., 2009

Synopsis

Today, two-thirds of the world's nations have abolished the death penalty, either officially or in practice, due mainly to the campaign to end state executions led by Western European nations. Will this success spread to Asia, where over 95 percent of executions now occur? Do Asian values and traditions support capital punishment, or will development and democratization end executions in the world's most rapidly developing region? David T. Johnson, an expert on law and society in Asia, and Franklin E. Zimring, a senior authority on capital punishment, combine detailed case studies of the death penalty in Asian nations with cross-national comparisons to identify the critical factors for the future of Asian death penalty policy. The clear trend is away from reliance on state execution and many nations with death penalties in their criminal codes rarely use it. Only the hard-line authoritarian regimes of China, Vietnam, Singapore, and North Korea execute with any frequency, and when authoritarian states experience democratic reforms, the rate of executions drops sharply, as in

About this title

About the Author

David T. Johnson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii and author of The Japanese Way of Justice: Prosecuting Crime in Japan, which received book awards from the American Society of Criminology and the American Sociological Association.

Franklin E. Zimring is the William G. Simon Professor of Law and Wolfen Distinguished Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment (voted a Book of the Year by The Economist).

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, U.S.A.
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195382455
• ISBN 13: 9780195382457
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 544