The fifth edition of this highly praised study charts and explains the progress that continues to be made towards the goal of worldwide abolition of the death penalty. The majority of nations have now abolished the death penalty and the number of executions has dropped in almost all countries where abolition has not yet taken place. Emphasizing the impact of international human rights principles and evidence of abuse, the authors examine how this has fueled challenges to the death penalty and they analyze and appraise the likely obstacles, political and cultural, to further abolition. They discuss the cruel realities of the death penalty and the failure of international standards always to ensure fair trials and to avoid arbitrariness, discrimination and conviction of the innocent: all violations of the right to life. They provide further evidence of the lack of a general deterrent effect; shed new light on the influence and limits of public opinion; and argue that substituting
for the death penalty life imprisonment without parole raises many similar human rights concerns.
This edition provides a strong intellectual and evidential basis for regarding capital punishment as undeniably cruel, inhuman and degrading. Widely relied upon and fully updated to reflect the current state of affairs worldwide, this is an invaluable resource for all those who study the death penalty and work towards its removal as an international goal.
Industry Reviews
`Review from previous edition The skill with which this material is brought together and evaluated from all over the world makes this book a documentary masterpiece...it is also an important contribution to the general theory of deterrence.'
Professor Heike Jung, Zeitschrift für Strafvollzug und Straffälligenhilfe
`Its rigorous scholarship and the breadth of its coverage are hugely impressive features; its claim to "worldwide" coverage is no idle boast. This can fairly lay claim to being the closest thing to a definitive source-book on this important subject.'
Paul Craig, Public Law
`This current edition of the series is an indispensable resource for serious students of the death penalty anywhere. It is also well written and happily devoid of academic pretension. We are long past the era when anyone could argue that trends in other nations are of no importance to domestic death penalty policy, and this is as true in the United States as in the PRC and Rwanda...What Hood and Hoyle provide their readers is a careful sifting of data
together with a level of analysis beyond the capacity of resources like Amnesty International.'
Punishment & Society 11 (2), 2009
`The prose is polished and eminently readable. The scholarship is what one expects from two top Oxford academics. The book is much more than an update of the third edition. It contains new chapters and develops subjects that were not treated in any detail by Professor Hood in the past. Its message is inspiring and its arguments are devastating. The fourth edition of The Death Penalty, A Worldwide Perspective book belongs in the library of all the readers of
this journal.'
William A. Schabas, Human Rights Quarterly 2009
`It is important to acknowledge that the book is not simply a scholarly masterpiece in the purely academic sense...this work constitutes a major contribution to the real world of punishing the most serious offenders...It is both masterly and magisterial and, especially for those who have a genuine interest in the subject, indispensible.'
Prof Barry Mitchell, Justice of the Peace Vol 172
`This fourth edition in 2008, takes the work to greater heights of being the last word on a worldwide perspective on the death penalty. No book on the subject gives such up-to-date authentic information on this grim subject.'
The Commonwealth Lawyer.
`...provide(s) a wealth of information, analysis and strategic advice on abolition from an international and comparative perspective...It constitutes an exhaustive and devastating critique of the way in which capital punishment functions currently'
Roger S Clark, Criminal Law Forum
