Table of Contents

Introduction ; 1. The Abolitionist Movement: Progress and Prospects ; 2. The Vanguard of Abolition ; 3. Where Capital Punishment Remains Contested ; 4. The Scope of Capital Punishment in Law ; 5. The Death Penalty in Reality: The Process of Execution and the Death Row Experience ; 6. Excluding the Vulnerable from Capital Punishment ; 7. Protecting the Accused and Ensuring Due Process ; 8. . Deciding Who Should Die: Problems of Inequity, Arbitrariness, and Racial Discrimination ; 9. The Question of Deterrence ; 10. A Question of Opinion or a Question of Principle? ; 11. The Challenge of a Suitable Replacement ; Appendix 1: Lists of Retentionist and Abolitionist Countries ; Appendix 2: Ratification of International Treaties ; Appendix 3: International Instruments ; Bibliography ; Cases Cited ; Index

About the Author

Roger Hood, CBE, QC(Hon),PhD, DCL, FBA is an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College and Professor Emeritus of Criminology, University of Oxford. He is a member of the British Foreign Secretary's Death Penalty Panel. Carolyn Hoyle, D.Phil, is a Fellow of Green College and Reader in Criminology at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford.

Reviews

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 indispensible 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 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