According to a recent op-ed about China in the New York Times, the world leader in exe­cu­tions is hav­ing sec­ond thoughts about the death penal­ty. Liu Renwen, a legal schol­ar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the annu­al num­ber of exe­cu­tions in China dropped by half from 2007 to 2011, as more offend­ers were giv­en ​“sus­pend­ed death sen­tences,” which are gen­er­al­ly reduced to life sen­tences. According to a 2008 poll in three provinces, pub­lic sup­port for the death penal­ty is about the same in China (58%) as in the United States (60%), but China car­ries out an esti­mat­ed 3,000 exe­cu­tions per year, many more than the U.S. (The U.S. ranks 5th in the world in the num­ber of exe­cu­tions.) There is con­cern in China about the uneven appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty: 69% of respon­dents in the poll said they believed that poor offend­ers were more like­ly to be exe­cut­ed than rich ones, and 60% said they thought inno­cent peo­ple could be wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed. China’s Supreme People’s Court recent­ly over­turned the death sen­tence of a woman who killed her hus­band after suf­fer­ing years of domes­tic abuse, per­haps sig­nal­ing a broad­er trend toward less use of capital punishment.

(M. Hvistendahl, ​“China Rethinks the Death Penalty,” New York Times, July 8, 2014). See International and Executions.

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