David T. Johnson and Franklin E. Zimring
The comparative study of death penalty policy is a relatively new and unpracticed discipline, and few of the existing studies concentrate on regional rather than global comparisons.1 This article makes the case for a regional approach by summarizing some of the most important findings from our book about capital punishment in Asia.2 That book is based on five major case studies of capital punishment in Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and China (chapters 3-7), and seven shorter case studies of capital punishment in North Korea, Hong Kong and Macao, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and India (appendices A-F).
Part one of this article summarizes death penalty policy and practice in the region that accounts for 60 percent of the world’s population and more than 90 percent of the world’s executions. The lessons from Asia are then organized into three parts. Part two describes features of death penalty policy in Asia that are consistent with the experiences recorded in Europe and with the theories developed to explain Western changes. Part three identifies some of the most significant diversities within the Asian region – in rates of execution, trends over time, and patterns of change – that contrast with the recent history of capital punishment in non-Asian locations and therefore challenge conventional interpretations of death penalty policy and change. Part four discusses three ways that the politics of capital punishment in Asia are distinctive: the limited role of international standards and transnational influences in most Asian jurisdictions; the presence of single-party domination in several Asian political systems; and the persistence of communist versions of capital punishment in the Asia region.
Overall, the study of death penalty policy in Asia confirms many of the major themes that have emerged from studies of the post-war European and Commonwealth experiences. Most notably, there have been declines in executions as a tool of crime control and in the political reputation of state execution in the region. Economic development and political democracy are both correlated with declining executions and with the abolition of capital punishment, but neither prosperity nor democracy is a sufficient condition for ending the death penalty. Concerns about the concentration of state power and its misuse are as prominent a theme in anti-death penalty rhetoric in Asia as they are in the West, and the most important feature of Asian nations that predicts their level of execution is not culture or crime rate but rather the nature of the political regime. Only authoritarian governments execute with any frequency in Asia , and most of the hard line authoritarian states in Asia where high rates of execution continue to occur are communist. Thus, while the political circumstances of Asia are different from those found in other parts of the world, the influence of political characteristics on death penalty policy are similar.