In December the UN General Assembly votes on calling for a global moratorium on capital punishment.
How comfortable would we be with a decision on capital punishment taken via a TV debate and a vote on Twitter?
Since then, however, a wave of serious crime, including the rape and murder of a young girl, has reopened the debate on capital punishment.
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Still others seem wickedly keen on widespread capital punishment for drug users and sellers.
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Federal legal sources also say they expect an outside counsel will be appointed to work with the public defender on the capital punishment aspect, since Massachusetts has no death penalty and federal officials there rarely deal with the complex legal maneuverings in such cases.
Over the years I have attended umpteen debates on the abolition of capital punishment.
His name, opinions, and sheer moxie were the stuff of headlines for years, for as a voluble man of causes, he was on record as loathing capital punishment, child labor, and the unfair laws depriving women of civil rights.
Yet though capital punishment remains on the statute books, it has long been suspended.
The BBC's Mohammed Allie in Cape Town says Nofemela was sentenced to death in 1987 for the murder of a farmer at a time when capital punishment was still on the statute books.
The Monday Club, which was set up in the 1960s over the decolonisation of Africa and seen in more recent years as a bastion of the Tory hard right, also lobbies on other contentious issues such as capital punishment.
Capital-punishment supporters, on the other hand, said the Holmes case was well-suited for the death penalty.
Traditionally, capital punishment is meted out on execution grounds, sometimes even in a sports stadium.
Where economic issues have taken the forefront in political discussions, social issues like the legality of abortion or capital punishment appear to have been placed on the back burner of political debates.
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The end of capital punishment would spare eight men who are on death row in New Jersey.
The country once had been at the forefront in the region's efforts to abolish in law and practice the death penalty, with a moratorium on the death penalty for 27 years and the abolition of capital punishment for drug offenses in April 2011, Heyns said.
The judge dismissed four potential jurors because of their opposition to capital punishment. (This judge later served on South Carolina's Supreme Court, and landed in some hot water by professing to find racist jokes inoffensive and funny.) It took the jury less than three hours to convict Mr Elmore, and an additional 50 minutes to sentence him to death.
Their Democratic counterparts, like Martin O'Malley of Maryland and Andrew Cuomo of New York, are putting themselves at the vanguard of Democratic wish lists from gay marriage and gun control to manufacturing jobs and capital punishment as they seek to be seen as a voice on issues paramount to a diverse coalition of minorities, women and young people that twice elected President Barack Obama.
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