The US decision to renew capital punishment without securing public support will gravely harm Washington's image worldwide, Hands Off Cain, an international non-governmental organization for the abolition of death penalty, told Sputnik on Friday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 26th July, 2019) The US decision to renew capital punishment without securing public support will gravely harm Washington's image worldwide, Hands Off Cain, an international non-governmental organization for the abolition of death penalty, told Sputnik on Friday.On Thursday, US Attorney General William Barr said that he had ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to adopt an amendment to the execution protocol in order to pave way for the resumption of capital punishment "after a nearly two-decade lapse." The attorney general has also scheduled the executions of five inmates convicted of killing children.
"This decision is just an expression of a populist approach totally disconnected with the domestic reality and the feeling of Americans who, according to a recent Gallup [poll], prefer other forms of punishment (such as life imprisonment without parole) than the death penalty ... [The move also] may impact negatively the image of the USA as supporters of freedom and justice and damage the global system of human rights," the NGO's Treasurer Elisabetta Zamparutti said.
The US return to death penalty goes out of line with global trends, which indicate that the number of retentionist countries declines annually as well as the number of death row inmates, while more and more US states abandon use of capital punishment, such as the recent moratorium in California or the abolition of death penalty in New Hampshire, the NGO underlined.
"The decision to resume federal executions is against the history because the death penalty is an instrument of the past ... [It] undermines the credibility of the USA foreign policy when facing regimes like China or Iran who are champions in the use of the death penalty," Zamparutti noted.
Earlier in the day, the European Union has also slammed the United States for resuming death penalty, saying that it "violates the inalienable right to life enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is a cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment."
