 Good evening everyone, my name is Katja Achiman and I am a member of the Executive Committee of the Cambridge Pro Bono Project or CPP. And on behalf of the Cambridge Pro Bono Project, I would like to welcome you all to the CPP speaker series talk tonight. By way of brief background, the CPP is now in its 11th year. It is a research program run out of the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge. What we do is to partner faculty members and graduate research students with leading barristers chambers, charities and NGOs to produce targeted research on issues of contemporary social significance. Alongside that work, we also provide a network here in Cambridge for students and faculty members with an interest in pro bono work and human rights. To that end, we are launching a regular speaker series this year. And as one of our speakers this time, I would like to very warmly welcome Professor Saul Lerfreund, who will speak on the death penalty context challenges and controversy. Professor Lerfreund has dedicated his career to representing prisoners facing the death penalty in criminal and constitutional proceedings, as well as well as before international bodies and courts. He is the co-founder and co-executive director of the death penalty project, an international legal action charity based at Simmons, Meirhead and Burton LLP in London. For more than three decades, the death penalty project has provided free legal representation to those facing the death penalty. It uses the law to protect prisoners facing execution and achieve fairer and more humane justice systems. Since joining Simon Meirhead and Burton in 1992, Professor Lerfreund has assisted lawyers in countries across the globe, including Uganda, Nigeria, India, Malaysia, Belize or Trinidad and Tobago in death penalty cases. He also participated in expert delegations to Japan, Taiwan, China and India, focusing on criminal justice reforms and the potential for restriction and abolition and abolition of the death penalty. He is, moreover, a founding member of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office pro bono panel, which represents British nationals facing the death penalty. As a leading authority on capital punishment and international human rights law, Professor Lerfreund has published and lectured extensively on these topics. In recognition for his services to international human rights law, he was awarded an MBE in 2000 and also received an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from the University of Reading, where in 2016 he was also appointed visiting professor of law. Professor Lerfreund's work has saved the lives of thousands of prisoners and fundamentally transformed the legal landscape in the countries in which he and the death penalty project operate. We are therefore extremely grateful to Professor Lerfreund to have him here to talk to us about the death penalty and to virtually host him here at Cambridge. Professor Lerfreund will be speaking for about 30 to 40 minutes and his talk will be followed by a 15 to 20 minute Q&A session. Please do post any questions you may have for Professor Lerfreund in the Q&A section of Zoom rather than in the chat function so people can see what you're asking. I would now like to hand over to Professor Lerfreund. Thank you very much, Professor. Thank you, Katja. Thank you very much for that very kind introduction. Hello everyone. I'm still not used to speaking, looking at myself, so I'll do my best. It's much better when we can actually be in the same space, so hopefully in months to come I'll come and visit you in Cambridge and we can do it all over again during happier times. So I'm going to try to get some slides up so you have to bear with me technology. Here we go. Okay. Right. Just one second. So I'm going to talk about the death penalty. I'm going to do a sort of global tour of the death penalty as quick as I can. And to take you through a sort of global context, what's going on in the world, who still has the death penalty, are we winning the battle, what are the challenges that remain and talk about some controversies as well. I'll just start off by a few of my own thoughts really about capital punishment. I've been doing this for a few decades now so I've got quite a few views that I'll share with you. But I think I'll start off the idea of putting people to death in the 21st century is simply barbarism. And if we lose one person who's innocent to execution, it's a condemnation of our society as a whole. And where such risks exist, and believe me, they do exist. There's simply no room for capital punishment regardless of cultural expectations of citizens and the demands of public opinion. So I don't need to moralize about the death penalty whether I believe in it whether I don't believe in it well I clearly don't believe in it, because I believe it's barbaric. But you don't even have to take that view. We can talk about pragmatic reasons why there should be no space for the death penalty based on a proper understanding of criminal justice systems. And once the fallibility of any criminal justice system is recognized and as lawyers, we should recognize that criminal justice systems are human and mistakes are inevitable. The question is, is not, does the person deserve to die. But the question is really, do we the people deserve to kill. So I'm going to, I hope this works, but I've embedded a few videos and I'll try and play a few videos to break it up a bit. And this video is focusing on Taiwan where we've been working for a long time with some fantastic partners at the Taiwan Alliance to win the death penalty. And there are currently 40 prisoners on death row in Taiwan. I hope this video will play for some reason. I don't want to play another way. Sorry, bye with me. Why did this happen to me? I think I'm about to die. But sometimes at night, in fact, it's really painful. Dreaming of being attacked, being hanged, anyone would wake up. If you are sentenced to death, you have to be executed. It won't come to you. You don't know when you will be taken out to execute. So you can only wait. You have to wait every day. You have to wait one day. It's sad that when you are waiting, you have that kind of feeling. You will be looking forward to them taking you out as soon as possible. To be executed. Because to me, death is a kind of execution. In fact, at the beginning, when I came back, I didn't dare to go out. First, I was afraid of human rights. Second, I didn't like the feeling of being executed for a long time. It took about a year to be able to adapt to our normal life. Okay, so Catch has already very helpfully described the work of the death penalty project. So I don't need to repeat that, but I just say, based on what we've just seen, that innocence and miscarriages of justice, as well as the understanding that the death penalty is the province of the poor, the marginalised and the vulnerable really lies at the heart of our work and has done for more than 30 years. And we provide our main work, maybe 60%, 70% of our work is to provide free legal representation to individuals in criminal appeals and to support NGOs and lawyers around the world who are representing prisoners facing potential execution. So that really is concerned with to decide or to help a court to decide whether conviction is safe, whether there's been a miscarriage of justice. But we're also involved in strategic litigation, which is looking at systemic change. So just to give you a few examples, we bought a case way back in 1993 called Pratt & Morgan, and this challenged the death row phenomenon. This was a Jamaican case and the two prisoners had been on death row for 14 and a half years. And we challenged the idea that prisoners should be kept on death row for that period of time based on understanding that after a certain period of time, it would just amount to cruel and unusual treatment and punishment. And in Taiwan, clearly you can see that those individuals were kept for decades on death row. We've also challenged the mandatory death penalty now successfully in 13 countries. This is where the judge has no discretion and the result of those cases has been huge. So in Uganda, for example, where we successfully challenged the mandatory death penalty, in one case it resulted in all 900 prisoners having their death sentences quashed and all being entitled to be resentenced. And none of the prisoners that were resentenced ended up back on death row. We've also been involved in strategic cases challenging the clemency process and try to open up the clemency process to judicial review. But aside from the legal representation, we tried to take a holistic approach, legal interventions on their own, a great, they save lives, they restrict the law, but to create real change and you need to be involved in other activities. So we focus heavily on education, awareness raising research, and also ultimately advocacy with policymakers who are going to make the change. So that's about legal representation. We don't work in the United States. We work predominantly in the Commonwealth, but a few other non Commonwealth countries like Taiwan and Japan as well. Our work started exclusively in taking appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. I won't get into who the Privy Council is, but the Privy Council used to be the, the final call for appeal for all of the British Empire. At one stage, this tribunal that sits in London and is made up of our Supreme Court judges had jurisdiction over two thirds of the world. Imagine that, but it did. But even today the Privy Council still has a jurisdiction for a number of Commonwealth Caribbean countries. We act in nearly all death penalty appeals from the Caribbean and bring criminal and constitutional appeals up to the Privy Council from local courts in the Caribbean. That work evolved to taking cases to international human rights tribunals. We've litigated very heavily before the UN Human Rights Committee under the IC CPR. It was also very present before the Inter-American Human Rights System, both the Inter-American Commission in the court and our constitutional litigation, which started in the Privy Council has really now spread throughout the Commonwealth. I mentioned Uganda. We're taking cases to Malawi. What's been so interesting jurisprudentially is that some of the judgments have really gone viral. So you see judgments from the Privy Council on death penalty issues and being cited all around the world and making a real mark, in particular some recent judgments from the late Lord Bingham. So these judicial reforms have been critical. And what they've done is they've created non-executing states. So they seriously restricted both the imposition and use of the death penalty, but they haven't achieved abolition and I'll come on to that. So as I mentioned before, abolition is a political question. So restricting the death penalty in law saves lives. But in the vast majority of abolitionist countries, the death penalty has been ended through the political process, not through the judicial process. Ultimately, abolition requires principal leadership. So for us, interactions with policymakers is crucial to encourage a re-examination of outdated laws, procedures and policies within the criminal justice system. The death penalty is a criminal justice issue, ultimately, as well as obviously a human rights issue. So our work outside of litigation focuses on raising standards, better understanding of human rights issues at stake, targeted training to judges, to mental health professionals. Mental disorder is a huge issue that we focus on within the death penalty. But whilst the standards are very clear in law, that you shouldn't be sentencing somebody to death who is mentally disordered. The real issue for the implementation of that standard is practical. And if you don't have mental health professionals conducting assessments of prisoners facing potential death sentences, then that standard will never be realized because laypeople simply can't diagnose mental disorder or intellectual disability. So we do a lot of work with mental health professionals around the world. And we try to create national advocates for change. I mean, one of the things that we're conscious of being a UK based NGO is that we're not going to change the death penalty. It has to be in country if the death penalty is going to move. And one of our principles that we've always had is we don't work anywhere without an invitation. So we don't parachute into any country and say we know better. We work with local NGOs with partner organizations, and we strengthen civil society wherever we work, we try to at least, and we try to give them the tools to create an environment for change. And part of that work has been to commission empirical research and I'll come on to the research, which has become increasingly important. It allows policymakers, the general public to make a much more informed appraisal of the issues at stake. That is what the research has done and to create a new dialogue around the death penalty and I'll focus in a bit on some of the research. But before I do that, let's just have a little look at what's going on in the world. So just a few headlines. It depends how you count. I mean, counting around the death penalty is quite interesting and mapping, but just to take the amnesty figures to start off with. We've now reached a stage where 72% of the world's nations have abolished in law and practice abolition and abolitionist in practice countries. The definition is there. It's from amnesty countries who have gone for more than 10 years without an execution but also have a subtle policy and moratorium in place. For example, they are categorized as abolitionist in practice states. Whilst 84 countries or 85 countries retain the United Nations as categorized 49 of those states as de facto abolitionist states this was at the end of 2018. So in total the UN has recorded 164 member states as abolitionist or abolitionist de facto. So the definition of de facto abolitionist is a country who has not executed for 10 years. So that's 83% of all the UN member states are regarded as either abolitionist or abolitionist de facto. And this has been a very quickly moving picture. Over the last 30 years, we've witnessed an explosion of abolition around the world. So when I started many years ago back in 1992, people like me fighting against the death penalty we were very much in the minority. The majority of the world at that stage retain the death penalty. And since then, you know, we've, we've, we've changed sides, we're now winning, right? We're, we're in the majority and the retentionists are very much in shrinking minority. And just to give you some idea of this, this change. 1948, only 15 countries around the world had abolished a death penalty. There were 35 crimes and seven for ordinary crimes. If you move forwards to 1988, there were 52 abolitionists in law. There were 35 for all crimes, 17 for ordinary. So only 28% of the world had abolished the death penalty in law. There were a further 27 who were regarded as abolitionist in practice. So at that stage in 1988, not so long ago, only 38% were abolitionist in law or practice. Whereas now there are 72% under those particular definitions. If you look regionally in Africa in 1981, there was only one abolitionist country. Today there are 22 countries within the African Union who have abolished. So 80% now of the countries within the African Union have abolished in law or practice. So I'm just trying to sort of show that the change has been rapid in terms of countries moving away from the death penalty. There are a few words on the US. I mean, we're not a US based organization, but it would be remiss of me not to mention the US when talking about the death penalty. You need to break down the US. New Hampshire became the 21st state to abolish a death penalty in 2019. And then shortly after Colorado became the 22nd state to abolish the death penalty. 28 states retain, but only five states in the US carried out executions. So far this year in 2020. And even more interestingly, if the 15 executions that have been carried out in the United States this year, eight of them have been federal executions carried out by the Trump administration. They were shocking stuff. In 2019 there were 22 executions carried out by seven states and no federal executions. So just a few words about federal executions as I say it would be remiss not to mention this. This year where that was the first federal executions for 17 years. They were carried out so far in the last five months with a further five scheduled before and during the transitional period. And the seven that were carried out in the four months leading up to the presidential election with the most federal executions carried out in the last 78 years. And then the hall became the eighth federal person to be executed by the Trump administration on the 11th of November. And the last time that the US government carried out an execution between an election and the inauguration of a new president was 132 years ago. So that just gives you some context to what is actually going on in America at the moment as we speak. The last states have been conducting the fewest executions over the last 37 years. The federal government has broken all records that have existed since 1896. So that's just a little just a bit of contemporary information on what is going on in the US. This slide just talks about the vote that happens at the UN General Assembly by annually every two years. And there's a vote on the states vote on a resolution calling for a worldwide moratorium. And you can see that this reflection of global change is evidenced in the moratorium vote. And every couple of years the vote increases those in favor and goes up those against goes down. And so the trend is evidenced in many different ways. Okay, this is the horribly table. These are the big executing countries around the world. And the plus is is where we're not sure. Okay, so the plus is mean we don't have the exact data this again comes from amnesty. So in 2019 if you exclude China, because we don't have exact figures from China, and this recorded 657 executions in 20 countries. And the lowest number for a decade, and excluding China, 8686% of executions took place in just four countries, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt. But I mean what's interesting is, I don't like using the word only or just but 20 countries executed out of a total of 193 UMM states. There are not that many executing countries, and there are even less persistent executors. So just seven countries we can count who have carried out more than 10 executions annually for more than a decade. Just touching on China China is by far the world's biggest executor. So we don't have verifiable data. Executions are classified as a state secret, anecdotally we know that numbers are going down. So the estimates in 1988 I think we're around 24,000 executions a year. Now the numbers are much less we don't know exactly but in the low thousands but nowhere near 24,000 so even in China. The death penalty is somewhat shrinking. Seeing as we are in the UK, just a few words on abolition in the United Kingdom. In 2015 that mark 50 years, since we effectively abolished the death penalty for the events of murder. The history by the 1950s public appetite, not public opinion but public appetite for the death penalty started to fade. And this was really centered around three notorious miscarriages of justice that most of them, I think they've all become films or they've all, there are definitely films, movies about all these cases. One was the terrible miscarriage of justice and execution of Timothy Evans in 1950. There's a film called Rillington Place about that particular case, three years after he was executed. He was discovered that the murders were in fact is a wife and his child were committed by John Christie, and not by Timothy Evans who was wrongly executed in 1952 Derek Bentley was executed. There's a very famous film called Let Him Have It. A young guy called Craig actually fired the fatal shots of a policeman. Bentley was standing by Craig was juvenile so he wasn't executed. Bentley was executed. He was notoriously said to have mentioned the words let him have it. But anyway, thousands of people signed a petition of mercy, asked the Home Secretary not to carry out the execution. That was ignored, and his family then spent 40 years clearing his name until he was granted a posthumous pardon. The other case that caused a lot of public concern was Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed, convicted of shooting her boyfriend. Again, thousands of people signed a petition for her mercy reprieve, but the game that was denied. And these cases really spurred the movement and greater momentum for Parliament to push for abolition in the UK. These cases raised concerns about innocence, mentally disabled people facing the death penalty and the vulnerable being executed. And there was also growing recognition, at least within the judiciary, parliamentarians and the media, that the death penalty was inextricably linked to error, arbitrariness, discrimination and inevitable cruelty. And what's interesting about the UK experience, and there's a very good report written by Julian Knowles, so Julian Knowles and our High Court judge who wrote this very interesting report for us, which is published, it's available on our website and it tells the whole story. One of the most interesting things about the UK is there are many lessons that other countries can learn from our experience of having the death penalty and abolishing the death penalty. And I think there are many lessons that can be learned from many countries who have moved away from the death penalty. I mean, miscarriage of justice is the obvious one. And post abolition, we again had a stack of miscarriage of justice cases. And had we had the death penalty. Innocent people would have been executed in this country, and the Guildford for the Birmingham six deaf and Kisco, all terrible cases, but all innocence cases and miscarriage of justice cases. The other lesson concerns public opinion. And what we know from our experience is that post abolition, you see that popular attitude shift with the, so the politicians take the lead and then the public do follow the political lead. And opinion polls have shown decreasing support for capital punishment since we abolish in 1986 it was 74% 2007 down to 50% in 2014 we went down to 45%. So abolition does create change in terms of public attitude, people is no longer the normative expectation, once it's no longer on the statute books. So, another measurement, an interesting measurement of capital punishment is to look at the pace of change in the Commonwealth where we work extensively, as compared to the globe. When you isolate the Commonwealth, interestingly, you see the pace of change is different and slower. There are 41 retentionist countries within the Commonwealth compared to 27% globally, and only 35% of Commonwealth have abolished compared to 54% globally. There is a strong conversation to be had about the colonial legacy of the death penalty. We abolished it in 1965 in the UK. Yet it was bequeath throughout the Commonwealth during colonial times, and pretty much used as a repressive tool. And yet it seems very, very hard to shift post since countries have become independent within the Commonwealth is very interesting conversation. It is not just linked to the death penalty. Some of the worst aspects of colonial laws, and the death penalty being one of them, sodomy laws, criminalization of homosexuality remain on the statute books in many Commonwealth countries today. Whilst, you know, we would always say it's very important to recognize the historical context. Countries should address the past and reject outdated and cruel punishments and create modern criminal justice systems fit for purpose. There's no room to rely on the past to defend the present. Again, not enough time just to focus on that is another conversation to be had. Okay, so barriers to abolition. Wherever we work, countries claim the death penalty is often unique to their culture and history, but the barriers to change we seem to be the same. Whichever continent we confront the death penalty and it's a combination there are more factors, but essentially it's a combination of these factors that are relied on to justify retention or an inability to move towards abolition. Ultimately abolition being a political question one needs to confront these perceived obstacles to change and I'm just going to focus on public opinion. There's no time to really deal with the other areas I mean deterrence is a poor argument for retention I mean social sciences debunked the whole concept that there's any greater deterrent effect there's no evidence to support the assertion that the death penalty is a greater deterrent effect than other forms of serious punishment, ie long term imprisonment. So I think social science is not a serious conversation anymore around deterrence. Likewise national sovereignty I don't think that there's a serious conversation to be had treaties regulate state behavior in so many ways. But I would like to say that the death penalty sits solely a matter of national criminal justice policy doesn't hold true anymore. But I mean, when one talks about public opinion, maybe I'll frame it in a couple of questions. The death penalty of political necessity, because it's demanded by a large majority of the public, or with the government and a criminal justice system lose legitimacy, if politicians were to ignore public sentiment. And those are the questions are often framed in retentionist countries around popular sentiment and the death penalty. There are initial pointers around this whole conversation of public opinion and the death penalty in human rights. We accept that public opinion can't be entirely ignored. But ultimately a country that's concerned for human rights shouldn't really accept public opinion as a reason for retaining the death penalty. And I say that, especially when public opinion is more often than not based on misconceptions about the assumed deterrent effect and the fairness and safety in the death penalty is application. It was also shown that the majority support the death penalty and retentionist countries do so because they are socialized and conditioned to accept it as the cultural and legal norm, rather than a sound basis of knowledge and principle. What's very interesting is that we can't think of a country that have abolished the death penalty because the public have demanded, or even supported abolition. It's always been a question of principle leadership and political will. It's never been abolished because of public sentiment. And we don't believe that public sentiment alone should determine penal policy. Before I talk about this slide about public opinion in Malaysia, I just want to touch on a very sad subject and our work for more than two decades has was greatly assisted by Professor Roger hood and tragically Roger passed away just two weeks ago. And Roger was a tire tireless champion of justice and human rights and he was a dear friend to all of us at the death penalty project and I'd like to pay tribute to Roger now. He only just completed a very new piece of research for us. He was 84. He was working tirelessly right up to the end. And he just completed a study on on opinion leaders attitudes to the death penalty in the Caribbean, and his contribution, not only to our work, but to the abolitionist movement globally was absolutely immense. He spent two decades designing and conducting unique and original research to challenge assumptions around the death penalty, especially around this question of public opinion, and to provide us and others in the community NGO community and governments and I do is with new empirical data to assist our efforts to bring about change. And I like to shed light on this Malaysia study. And this brilliant piece of work that Roger masterminded in Malaysia a few years ago, and it has this a ground breaking piece of research and it was really focused around the mandatory death penalty which Malaysia still retains. We were confronted by statements from parliamentarians that the public public strongly supported the use of the mandatory death penalty, and that public sentiment would be a barrier to any reform. But there was no empirical data to back up those assertions. So, against that background we commissioned Roger to. It says Roger hidden the DPP we didn't we commissioned Roger to conduct the first large scale and study on the mandatory death penalty in Malaysia, and using its sauce and independent research agency. It was a huge study with over 1600 respondents. It raised a large number of questions, but also Roger devised a number of scenario cases, and the public were asked to judge those cases and sentence those cases, based on the facts presented. And when faced with real case scenarios, very, very few people actually sentenced to death. And so the reports available on our website but I'll just touch on a few of the findings. These types of surveys have challenged assumptions made by governments that it's necessary to retain the death penalty because public opinion reflects high level of interest and concern. But when we did this survey, the results showed a very low lack of interest concern and knowledge. And one in 10 were concerned about the death penalty. That's less than 10% over 50% so they weren't informed at all. And actually 59% didn't even know that the death penalty was mandatory from this representative sample. So these findings were particularly interesting. There were other very important questions about the impact of information on the public and support is contingent on the belief that the death penalty is administered without error. And when you introduce to the public questions about, would they still support the death penalty if they knew the innocent person could be executed. Support fell dramatically. Not only Malaysia, but in parallel surveys we've worked on in China, public support dropped from 58% to 25% in Trinidad support dropped from 90% to 30% and in Singapore it dropped from 90% to 40%. The other very interesting question that I pulled up is one about policy, is the death penalty the most appropriate policy. So whilst as a headline figure, a majority would support the death penalty, those same majority that same majority did not feel that the death penalty was the most effective policy when asked to rank a number of policies as the most effective in reducing violent crime. And this draws on the findings from a parallel survey in Singapore. In all the surveys we've conducted where we've posed this ranking question, social action and police effectiveness, always regarded by the public to be the most effective policies. And very interestingly, more execution is always ranked last, wherever we've done, included this type of ranking question. So they support the death penalty, they don't actually believe it's an effective tool to combat violent crime. So I'm going to go to a short film, I'll have to get out of this to show it, a short film about this survey. The practice of automatically imposing the death penalty, a relic of colonialism, has been widely rejected as having no place in the modern world. A majority of countries have abolished the mandatory death penalty, and of the 53 nation commonwealth, just nine still impose this outdated law. And six of these have not carried out executions for at least two decades, that leaves just three. In Malaysia, the death penalty is mandatory for murder, treason and certain cases of drug trafficking and firearms offenses. The individual circumstances of the case cannot be taken into account. The judge has no option to impose a death sentence. An independent academic survey revealed that 53% of Malaysians were not informed about the death penalty. Most people did not even know that the death penalty was automatic for certain crimes. The same survey revealed a majority of Malaysians did not think the death penalty was appropriate in many case scenarios, being typical by the Attorney General's office. Case one, 19 year old male, previous convictions, none, crime, shoots dead a drug dealer on orders of an older man. Case two, female, previous convictions, none, crime, kills her abusive husband by deliberately poisoning his food. Case three, 19 year old male, previous convictions, none, crime, broke into house at night carrying a loaded gun, shoots at householder when disturbed but misses, no one is killed. Just one in a hundred people thought the death penalty should be imposed in all the cases they were asked to consider. The mandatory death penalty is one of the reasons Malaysia's death row population is so large. At the end of 2017, it was reported there were more than 1,000 people under sentence of death in Malaysia. In Vietnam 600, Thailand 502, India 371, Indonesia 260, Japan 134 and Singapore around 40. Now Malaysia's newly elected government has promised to abolish oppressive laws, including the mandatory sentence of death by hanging. A penalty widely rejected across the world as an abhorrent practice that is unjust and inhumane. With the government, the international community and the Malaysian public all opposing the mandatory death penalty, is it time to consign this colonial relic to history? Read the independent public opinion survey and other research at deathpenalteproject.org. Okay, so just to end up just I started on wrongful convictions and I think I'll end up on wrongful convictions as well. It's so powerful. We know that there is no such thing as a perfect justice system. We know that error arbitrariness discrimination against minorities and the most vulnerable members of society is part and parcel of the death penalty problem. I've mentioned the problem in the UK of certain cases. You saw the video from Taiwan. So focusing on the US since 1973, 172 people have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence. And many of those 172 prisoners spent decades proving their innocence. What remains is how many people have been executed who were unable to uncover evidence or were unable to get good lawyers to prove their innocence. So I'll just end up by taking you through a few slides about the case of Anthony Ray Hinton. So he was arrested in 1985. He was charged with two murders and he was sentenced to death. He was eventually released some 30 years later in 2015. He was the hundred and well, so far 172 people have been exonerated. This point at the bottom this comes from something that Brian Stevenson who's one of our patrons people may know who Brian is. He's a DJI in Alabama. The film Just Mercy is about Brian. But Brian always says that for every nine people executed in the US in the modern era, one person on death row has been exonerated. And what Brian says is, would you get on a plane if one in nine flights crashed. And it's quite a powerful thought really. This is just a short film now about Anthony Ray Hinton. Think about your freedom until it is taken away from little punishment exists. There is the risk that innocent people will be sentenced to death. In the US alone, 163 people have been freed from death row since 1973. Eight of those people released in just the last five years had spent at least 30 years each on death row. In 1985, Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested and charged with two murders he did not commit. I was cutting grass. I just happened to look up and there was two white gentlemen standing there and I said, can I help you? And they identified themselves as detectives. And they said, we have a warrant for your arrest. And I said, for what? They said we charged you with first degree attempted murder, first degree wrong and first degree kidnapped. I said, well, you got the wrong person. I ain't done none of that. Bronley claimed the bullets from the crimes came from a gun found in his mother's house. There was no other evidence against him. He passed a polygraph test but no one believed him. He had enough money to pay for a good lawyer. So his ballistics expert was blind. In what eye? Yes, that's correct. In 1989, the Equal Justice Initiative took on Anthony Ray Hinton's case. They engaged three of the nation's top firearms experts. And all three of them came to the same conclusion that the bullets didn't match. After a long legal battle, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Anthony Ray Hinton's conviction in 2014. After 30 years, he was finally set free. My 40, my 50, but what they couldn't take was my jaw. Criminal justice system is perfect. Mistakes happen wherever you are in the world. All it takes is one dishonest police officer, one incompetent lawyer, one overzealous prosecutor or one mistaken witness and the system fails. In 2016, more than 60 death row prisoners were exonerated worldwide. But these are just the cases we know about. Many wrongful convictions will never be discovered. All this, how can the death penalty ever be justified? I think if you if you stop sharing your screen. Yeah. Okay, so thank you everybody. So I'll stop there. That's a good point to stop. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for for your presentation. That was really, really interesting. And now we're going to just any any if the audience has any questions, please type them in the Q&A. We do have some questions that we were sent beforehand. So Katja, do you want to kick off? Yes, thank you very much. So for your very interesting talk, Matt Saikaris, a fellow PhD student at the law faculty and also member of the Cambridge pro bono project asks, has to reason global trend towards more authoritarian government changed or affected your advocacy for reform and the nature of your work with governments and law reform bodies? Has there been a noticeable change in culture in recent years? You just need to unmute yourself. Yeah. I mean, I mean, there are, I mean, I mean, it's a really good question. I mean, I think that our focus is you have to pick your, your countries. So I would say that there are a number of countries who are in the de facto abolitionist group. Some countries have had the death penalty on the statute books having carried out executions for decades. Kenya nearly 40 years. Some of the Caribbean countries for 30 plus years. Those countries we feel there's a conversation to be had about finally abolishing the death penalty. There are other countries where the conversation is much harder. And abolition isn't potentially realistic at the moment. And so in those countries, there's about trying to restrict the death penalty, trying to push for moratoriums on the death penalty. But yeah, where countries are authoritarian, where countries don't respect the rule of law, the conversation is very difficult to have. But I do feel that even for those regimes, you can see with the numbers that the persistent executors are being isolated. And there's a small group of them that are left. And it's not really a good group. And I think reputation does matter. Not everywhere, but in a lot of countries. And if you looked at the league table I put up, it's not something you really want to be on. So I think that the more countries that move away from the death penalty, there will be an isolated rump of countries left. And either they'll be, they won't care. And they'll want to still be in that group. Or they realize that the world has changed and the state sanction killing is simply not justifiable anymore. I might just ask a question that I've got from outside of the chat here. Sort of related to what you were just saying about, you know, lots of countries are moving towards abolition. And in the first video you showed us, it did seem like there was some mention in that from the people who were talking about the treatment that they'd received, which was sounding like what we would consider, you know, in human or degrading treatment, possibly even torture. In the countries where you're seeing these moves away from using the death penalty, is that something that the death penalty project as an organization might start looking into in the future? Like more of a sort of the work that you do in the death penalty sort of sphere, taking that into like in human degrading treatment torture? Or are you still keeping very sort of focused on your key core abolition of death penalty? Yeah, 95% of our work is death penalty focus. But we also deal with what happens after the death penalty. So how do you replace the death penalty? So we're very concerned about conversations about replacing the death penalty with life without the possibility of parole, which some people would say is life without hope. And it might seem like a quick sell to replace the death penalty with that type of sentence to appease the public. But we don't feel that replacing one in human punishment with another, potentially human punishment is the answer. So in a number of countries where former clients who are on death row have had their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment, we are involved in litigation and looking at what life sentences mean and certain jurisdictions to ensure that release mechanisms, parole systems work properly where they do exist and where they don't exist to encourage the introduction of proper parole systems for people who have served very long time in prison. Great. We have a couple of more questions now. Julia Freitag asks, fantastic thought. Thank you. Quickly on China, although I do appreciate this isn't somewhere you formally or a country who is conducive too much or any dialogue about this, but are we seeing a disproportionate attack on wiggers from the numbers of people we see on death row? Or is this data so we simply cannot tell? Interestingly, in China, I mean, there has been dialogue. So our organisation has worked on different projects in China, working with different institutes, the Max Planck Institute, the National University of Ireland, the Centre for Chronology at Oxford. We collaborated on a large scale project looking at the death penalty in China. It wasn't to bring legal challenges, but it was to discuss the potential for reform of the death penalty. And there have been some positive steps. I mean, it depends how you measure steps, but there have been steps in China to reduce the number of crimes. This has happened. So the number of crimes for which the death penalty is a potential sentence has been reduced in recent years. And an extra level of scrutiny applies to capital cases now. All death sentence cases have to be reviewed by the Supreme People's Court. That is a relatively new intervention. And there's definitely been a shift in, I'd say, in public attitudes through the internet. A number of notorious miscarriages of justice have caused public concern about the use of the death penalty. So whilst China is still a very large executor, there's no question about it. And again, we can't really put a number on it. We've definitely seen a change. And there has been relatively open dialogue in recent years about reforms. So abolition, I have no idea about when China would abolish the death penalty, but there have been conversations, at least with academics in China, looking at the need for change, the need for reform. So we've got a question in the Q&A and also a question in the chat, which I think we can kind of combine. So I might try and do that. So in the Q&A, Stephanie Palmer asks, I think that the link to colonialism is very interesting. Is colonialism, sorry, now used as an excuse, or is there something more fundamental at play? And then the question, which is in the chat, which I think relates to this point from Jennifer Trigel, sorry if I didn't say that right, says, thank you for an excellent talk. What do you think the reason is for Commonwealth states being disproportionately slow to revoke the death penalty compared to the global average? And then there's an extra, as an aside, they're also disproportionately likely not to have adopted a right to a healthy environment. Do you think that it is general reticence to legal reform or something else? Well, I wouldn't level that at the judiciary. I think in the judiciary we've seen a lot of judicial activism throughout the Commonwealth, whether that's in India, through the Supreme Court of India, whether it's been Caribbean judges, some fantastic recent decisions from the Caribbean Court of Justice. Part of the problem is structure. It's the way the Commonwealth, well, a lot of the Commonwealth constitutions preserve preexisting laws. They're all based on a similar model. The death penalty is enshrined as an exception to the right to life. So it's very difficult to move away from the death penalty without constitutional amendment. So there are some legal impediments to change. But I'd say that broadly, and it's hard to speak about 50 odd countries in one breath, but I'd say broadly there's been a lack of political leadership on the issue. So for example, if you take a country that's gone decades without executing, but that still has the death penalty on the statute books and may still sentence people to death, but then will routinely commute those death sentences. The answer to, well, isn't it time to move away from the death penalty altogether? The kind of answer we get is, well, what's the problem? We're not executing, just leave it alone. We're not executing the death penalty. We're not executing the death penalty. We're not doing this to get the death penalty or abolition of the death penalty on the political agenda. People don't see this as a vote winner. And it's really a political game, ultimately, abolition of the death penalty. So there is a lot of reticence. Interestingly, the judiciary in Kenya a couple of years ago was being strongly linked to a bad colonial past and wanting to create a fresh legal order for the people of the Caribbean or the people of Kenya unshackled from colonial laws and colonial punishments. So there is a conversation that is happening, but it's not necessarily happening through politicians. I mean, in some countries, the colonial punishments are being perpetuated. So Singapore and Malaysia are good examples where the colonial punishment, the death penalty was for murder. And then Singapore extended that to drug offenses as well and then imposed a mandatory death penalty for drug offenses that had nothing to do with the colonial order. These are developments by Singapore, independent Singapore and independent Malaysia. And I think that when you take the Commonwealth as a whole and you try to attack it through Commonwealth bodies, I think the Commonwealth sort of lacks teeth on human rights issues if I'm to be perfectly frank. And it's very difficult to get human rights issues on the Commonwealth agenda. So when there are Commonwealth heads of government meetings, we tried for the whole time I've been doing this to get the death penalty on the Commonwealth and we simply can't do it. So it doesn't seem to be a Commonwealth appetite in spite of the fact that there's a Commonwealth charter on human rights to address the death penalty. And maybe it's not something that can be pushed by the UK politically. The UK is the wrong country to try to lead on human rights issues within the Commonwealth given the history. But maybe there are other abolitionist issues within the Commonwealth via Canada, South Africa, New Zealand. Maybe they need to take the lead on these particular issues. Okay, great. I think we have time for probably one more question. This is from an anonymous attendee who asks how careful should we be when attempting to argue that lengthy periods on death row constitute inhuman or degrading treatment? Are we not encouraging countries maintaining the death penalty to act more quickly following sentencing, enacting more executions and reducing the time available to mountain appeal? Good question. The answer is you have to be very careful deploying the death row phenomenon argument. In the US, we haven't pushed and friends of ours that litigate in the US are afraid of running the arguments in the US for exactly those reasons. In the Commonwealth Caribbean, in Zimbabwe, where they've also rejected the death row phenomenon in India to a certain degree, where they've also rejected the death row phenomenon, at least post-conviction death row phenomenon or pending clemency. There's no risk that they'll cut the appellate process. So the appeals still run. There's no risk there. I think that what's interesting is if you look at the judgments carefully, so if you look at the Pratt & Morgan judgment carefully, it could really be a judgment abolishing the death penalty full stop because it talks about the alternating hope and despair of being on death row. For me, it's arbitrary to say that after five years that that bites and it becomes inhuman degrading. It may bite after one day of going through the psychological torture of being on death row, and going back to that Taiwan video, and we're currently involved in a study looking at the profiling socioeconomic profile of all 40 death row prisons in Taiwan and also mental health screening. There's a serious concern that all prisoners who end up being subjected to or sentenced to death suffer from what we call the death row syndrome. So that's not a medical term, but it's just, I think we'll all understand what we mean by that. So the death row phenomenon is really one stage away from abolition. I think the arguments for abolition are the same as the arguments against keeping people on death row for long periods of time. But yes, you have to take a careful view as to how the judgment will be received. There's no doubt in the Caribbean since 1992 it's had a dramatic impact on reducing executions. So it's been a positive development, but it's also a recognition that the death penalty is ultimately cruel and inhuman. Thank you very much, Saul, for your answers and your very thought provoking. But also, I think for those who do pro bono work, hopeful talk and we've seen the change, the rapid changes that happened. Thanks very much to your work and the work of the death penalty. Just for those who attended today, thank you very much. Please stay tuned to see if he has a number of interesting guests that we've invited for next term. So we'll send out invitations and the term called very soon. Thank you very much, everyone. And I think, yeah, thank you very much again to Saul Learfreund for taking the time to be with us tonight. Thank you very much. Pleasure. Thanks for having me.