Coalition Of The Killing

Amnesty International released its annual report today on the use of the death penalty worldwide. As in previous years, the United States remains one of the world’s most enthusiastic practitioners of the death penalty.

According to Amnesty’s report  

there were 24 confirmed countries and another two suspected countries that executed prisoners in 2007 for a grand total of 26 grim reaper countries this past year. Amnesty further reports that there are 135 nations in the world that have abolished the death penalty and 62 countries that have not.

As you can see from the table on the right, taken from Amnesty's report, the United States came in fifth after such fellow stalwarts of human rights like China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

The number of government-murdered convicts in the USA would have been higher in 2007 were it not for a temporary partial moratorium on executions due to a currently on-going Supreme Court review of the constitutionality of lethal injections. This review unfortunately does not concern the death penalty itself. The issue at hand is whether the lethal injection methodology is sufficiently humane so as not to be unconstitutional under the 8th amendment's prohibition of ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’

Interestingly, the US is immediately followed by Iraq as executioner number 6. I guess we must be doing something right there since Iraq is at least following in the freedom footsteps of the USA when it comes to embracing capital punishment.