3,000 Italians run against death penalty, even as executions rise

Some 3,000 Italian nationals took part in New York City's Marathon on November 4, 2007. And the Italian government - the main governmental force supporting the anti-death penalty efforts of the group Hands Off Cain - used some of its runners to promote the Italian commitment to stop capital executions worldwide.
One of those taking part was the Italian-born Olympic and European champion Stefano Baldini. Baldini wore a ribbon while some other runners wore ribbons or patches that read "Stop the death penalty" along with the Hands Off Cain logo.

With the New York City Marathon coursing through all five boroughs of the city, Italy's government has asked its nationals to help endorse an end to capital punishment by wearing ribbons and patches supporting a universal moratorium on capital executions.
Even though some 146 countries and territories in the world are officially against the death penalty, the number of prisoner executions increased last year, according to a recent report by Hands Off Cain.
Some 5,628 people were put to death in capital punishment cases by their governments in 2006, the Rome-based group announced. In 2005, 5,494 death penalty cases were implemented and in 2004, 5,530 were performed.
"There are currently 146 countries and territories that to different extents have decided to renounce the death penalty," the groups' report announced. "Of these, 93 are totally abolitionist, 9 are abolitionist for ordinary crimes, 1 (Russia) is committed to abolishing the death penalty as a member of the Council of Europe and currently observes a moratorium on executions, 4 have a moratorium on executions in place and 39 are de facto abolitionist (i.e. - no executions have taken place in the last ten years).
"Countries retaining the death penalty worldwide are down to 51, compared to 54 in 2005 and 60 in 2004. The gradual abandonment of the death penalty is also evident in the declining use of capital punishment in retentionist countries, including those that actually maintain the practice of putting people to death."
Hands Off Cain has been petitioning for a worldwide ban on the death penalty since 1994. In 1997, it got the Italian government to formally request a resolution for a moratorium on the death penalty at the United Nations Commission for Human Rights in Geneva. When that resolution was finally passed, it declared a "conviction that [the] abolition of the death penalty contributes to the enhancement of human dignity and to the progressive development of human rights."
Hands Off Cain is now seeking a United Nations moratorium - it wants a worldwide recognition of the need to abolish the death penalty. Italy and what Hands Off Cain calls "a global coalition of abolitionist countries from all continents," will present a resolution for Universal Moratorium on capital punishment at the United Nations later this week. The groups' online petition, which can be found at, asserts that "After the abolition of slavery and the banning of torture, the right not to be killed following a legal sentence should be another common denominator, a new inalienable aspect of being human that makes us one family."
Countries in Asia - in particular, the nations of China, Iran and Pakistan - still use the death penalty more than in any other region of the world. In Europe, Belarus was the only nation to use executions; it killed 3 people in 2006. And in Africa, a total of 80 executions took place in six of the continent's 53 nations.
Throughout the Americas, however, the only nation to resort to the death penalty was the United States, which carried out 53 executions in 2006. The U.S.'s 53 government-sanctioned killings last year demonstrated an actual a decline in this nation's use of the death penalty - back in 1999, the U.S. killed 98 people - but the number is still more than the combined number of executions carried out by the four other liberal democracies that still have the death penalty on their books: in Japan 4 people were killed, Mongolia had 3, Indonesia also had 3 and Botswana killed 1.
"The southern part of the United States carried out 83 percent of the executions last year," notes the Hands Off Cain report. "As usual, Texas alone was responsible for almost half of the executions nationwide, 24 to be exact. The number of death sentences issued also declined: 112 in 2006 as opposed to 128 in 2005 and 138 in 2004.
"The total number of inmates on death row in 2006 (3,344) is up slightly from 2005 (3,254). The difference can be explained by the less-felt effects of civil rights rulings by the Supreme Court between 2002 and 2005 that excluded the mentally retarded and minors, respectively, from facing execution.
"Furthermore, for the first time a National Gallup Poll showed that life imprisonment surpassed the death penalty as a justifiable sentence for serious crimes. A successive poll by the Death Penalty Information Center, made public on June 9, 2007, revealed that 58 percent of Americans were in favor of a moratorium on executions...The methods of carrying out executions, racial prejudices and class prejudices, but, above all, continued discoveries of miscarriages of justice and wrongful executions have all contributed to invigorating the debate on the death penalty."
The Hands Off Cain campaign is in line with U.S. based efforts to examine how the criminal justice system works here. In New York state, there has been a de facto moratorium on capital punishment ever since the New York State Supreme Court declared aspects of the death penalty unconstitutional on June 24, 2004. New Jersey, meanwhile, became the first state in the United States to introduce a moratorium on capital punishment by law in 2006.
The Washington, D.C.-based Sentencing Project explored the continued disproportionate incarceration of Blacks in it's recent study, "Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration By Race and Ethnicity" by Marc Mauer and Ryan S. King.
That study showed that Blacks find themselves imprisoned 5.6 times the rate of whites: "Comparing the rates of incarceration for African Americans with those for whites reveals profound patterns of racial disparity," Mauer and King wrote: "For example, the state with the lowest rate of incarceration for African Americans - Hawaii, at 851 per 100,000 population - maintains a rate 15 percent higher than the state with the highest rate for whites - Oklahoma, at 740 per 100,000 population. While more than 1 percent of African Americans in 49 states and the District of Columbia are incarcerated, there is not a single state in the country with a rate of incarceration that high for whites."
With the higher chance for imprisonment, comes the higher chance of a death sentence. And the authors of the study, "Who Survives on Death Row? An Individual and Contextual Analysis" published last month in the American Sociological Review, "find that African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics who are convicted of killing whites are significantly more likely to be executed on death row than other offenders. Yet, African Americans convicted of killing nonwhites are less likely to be executed."
The study's "findings also demonstrate that states' political and social climates influence the ultimate fate of inmates on death row. States with higher percentages of African American and Hispanic residents produce higher execution probabilities, suggesting that capital punishment is more likely where the perceived threat of victimization by minorities is higher."