human rights approach obligates duty bearers (usu-
ally States) to: 1) respect; 2) protect; and 3) fulll
human rights. In the context of the death penalty,
this means not depriving the fundamental human
rights—such as life—of those sentenced to crimes;
taking positive steps to ensure the human rights of
the accused and sentenced; and adopting national
legislation to achieve full realization of the rights of
these individuals.
On October 10, 2011, CCR joined the world in com-
memorating the 9th Annual World Day Against the
Death Penalty, by issuing a position paper entitled,
e US Tortures Before it Kills: An Examination of the
Death Row Experience from a Human Rights Perspec-
tive, which analyzes life on death row—including
decades in solitary connement with limited human
contact, and the intolerable process of repeatedly
coming within hours of execution—as torture under
international human rights law. According to the
Convention Against Torture (CAT), a treaty rati-
ed by the US in 1994, torture is dened, in part, as
“any act by which severe pain or suering, whether
physical or mental, is inicted on a person for such
purposes as […] punishing him for an act he […] has
committed or is suspected of having committed.”
Torture is a crime against humanity, a war crime, and
a violation of the Geneva Conventions, as reected
in the statutes of the International Criminal Court,
the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda, among other judicial authorities. Over
the last 15 years, a substantial body of law has de-
veloped that sets forth the elements of torture under
customary international law, which largely reects
the denition of torture under the CAT. Torture has
been found to be “a violation of personal dignity and
is used for such purposes as intimidation, degrada-
tion, humiliation and discrimination, punishment,
control or destruction of a person.”
It has been shown that humans experience isolation
as torture. Decades in isolation without access to
family, other prisoners, programming, or any other
form of intellectual or social stimulation, along
with the constant knowledge of one’s impending,
but uncertain death, combine to create the death
row phenomenon. e UN Special Rapporteur on
Torture, Juan Méndez, has recently called for the
prohibition of solitary connement and in August
2011 issued a report on this practice amounting to
torture.
The Death Penalty in the United States
In addition to violating the right to life, critics have
argued that capital punishment, as it is applied in the
United States, is expensive, racist, arbitrary, and fal-
lible. Further, the deterrent eect of the death pen-
alty has never been proven. Decades of experience
have conrmed that capital punishment in the US is
not only a fundamental human rights violation, but
is also fundamentally awed in design and imple-
mentation. Additionally, prisoners in the US spend
decades on death row in dehumanizing conditions
which amount to torture under international law.
Legally putting people to death has not been a con-
stant practice in the United States; from 1967-1977
executions were halted across the US. However, cur-
rently, approximately 3,300 people still await execu-
tion in the United States. 34 states are still retention-
ist, meaning they have death penalty laws on the
books.
People of color have accounted for a disproportion-
ate 43% of total executions since 1976 and 55% of
those currently awaiting execution—while they only
account for approximately 27% of the general popu-
lation. e death penalty, as applied, has been found
to violate the non-discrimination requirement found
in international human rights law. Two treaties which
the U.S. has ratied, the International Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimi-
nation (ICERD) and the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) ensure the right to
non-discrimination. In 2006, the UN Human Rights
Committee recommended that the U.S. “assess the
extent to which [the] death penalty is disproportion-
ately imposed on ethnic minorities and on low-
income population groups, as well as the reasons for
this, and adopt all appropriate measures to address
the problem.”
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