The Asia-Pacific Journal, Japan Focus, recently featured an article entitled, “Death Penalty Lessons from Asia,” written by David T. Johnson and Franklin E. Zimring. The article is based in part on the authors' book, The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia. Johnson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii. Zimring is the William G. Simon Professor of Law and Wolfen Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. The article takes an in-depth look at the practice of the death penalty in Asian jurisdictions over the last few decades. Drawing parallels with the death penalty movement in Europe, Johnson and Zimring present economic development, political change and public opinion as influential to the practice of capital punishment in Asian countries. Their book is based on 5 major case studies of capital punishment in Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and China, and 7 shorter case studies of capital punishment in North Korea, Hong Kong and Macao, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and India.
The Walla-Walla Union Bulletin is focusing on the state's death penalty in a 4-part series entitled, "Executing Justice." The series examines issues such as the costs of the death penalty, arbitrariness, and the appeals process. Washington currently has eight men on death row, and has not had an execution since 2001. In almost 30 years, there has been only one non-consensual execution. Four defendants have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1981, but three of the four defendants waived their appeals. The paper cites a Washington State Bar Association report noting that of the 270 convictions for aggravated murder since 1981, the death penalty was sought 79 times, resulting in 30 death sentences. The majority of those cases were overturned on appeal, and most of those reversals resulted in life without parole sentences. The Bar Association estimates that a death penalty case costs $754,000 more than other murder cases, not including the $100,000 associated with preparing for an execution.
A recent study of the military death penalty by Professor David Baldus revealed disparities depending on whether the victim in the underlying crime was also a member of the military or was a civilian. The paper was co-authored by Professors Catherine Grosso and George Woodworth and will be published by the Michigan Journal of Law Reform. The authors note that despite a 1984 executive order that "defined death eligible murder in the armed forces principally in terms of civilian murder modeled after state law systems," the military death penalty has been implemented in such a way that shows a large disparity between military murder and civilian murder. The study concluded that soldiers who are accused of civilian murder were less likely to face a capital court martial, to receive a capital conviction, and to be sentenced to death than soldiers who were accused of a military murder (murder of a commissioned or non-commissioned officer). "In this process," the report said, "the military death penalty has come to be used almost exclusively as a disciplinary vehicle to protect the authority and effectiveness of military command."
The OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), the world's largest regional security organization comprised of 56 States including the U.S., recently published a 2009 Background Paper on The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area. It was prepared by the OSCE's Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), and updates the 2008 background paper of the same title. The 2009 paper highlights the changes in status of the death penalty in participating OSCE states. Of the 56 countries, only the U.S. and Belarus retain an active death penalty. The Russian Federation and Tajikistan retain the death penalty but are not carrying out executions. The full text of the paper can be found in English and Russian on ODIHR's 
The latest Gallup Poll on the death penalty shows 65% of Americans support the death penalty, significantly lower than the 80% support recorded in 1994 and near the lowest support of 64% in the past 25 years recorded last year. Only 57% believe the death penalty is fairly applied, and 59% of Americans believe that an innocent person has been executed in the last five years. Gallup reported that support for the death penalty is lower if Americans are offered an explicit alternative, such as life imprisonment with absolutely no possibility of parole. The last time that Gallup offered such alternatives in 2006, only 47% preferred the death penalty, while 48% supported life imprisonment with no parole.
