If Lethal Dictators Ban the Death Penalty, Who Cares?(Periscope; The Measure Of Civilization)

Byline: Joseph Contreras and Owen Matthews

For years now, the death penalty has been held up as a marker of enlightenment, distinguishing the cultivated states that ban it from the brutish ones that still administer it. By this measure, the world is becoming a much more righteous place, with 135 of 197 nations now in the cultivated camp, up from 105 a decade ago when pillars of Western civilization like Canada and Britain still employed the death penalty. More surprising members are banning the punishment every month: the latest converts include Albania, Rwanda and Uzbekistan--and none of them was previously known as a paragon of respect for individual life. Now they have been saluted by human-rights groups like Amnesty International and the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center for discarding the ultimate tool of official retribution.

But the longer this list becomes, the more dubious is its use as a yardstick of societal advancement. Rwanda has come a long way since the genocide that took 800,000 lives in the 1990s, yet extrajudicial killings by government security forces increased in 2007, according to the U.S. State Department. Uzbekistan is still run by a Communist-era dictator known in the past for boiling opponents alive and whose troops mowed down more than a hundred antigovernment protesters in the city of Andizhan just three years ago. Angola ended capital punishment in 1992, but its military and police have been accused of unlawful killings. Colombia, Mexico and ...