The present study addresses the question, “How serious is bribery?” In order to arrive at an answer, it was necessary to compare the seriousness of bribery to that of other selected acts. World Values Survey data for Romania were used to compare bribery to 18 other moral issues. Respondents...

The present study addresses the question, “How serious is bribery?” In order to arrive at an answer, it was necessary to compare the seriousness of bribery to that of other selected moral acts. World Values Survey data for the Philippines were used to compare bribery to 18 other moral...

This article traces the history of Minnesota's anti-death penalty movement and the 1889 Minnesota law - dubbed by contemporaries as the "midnight assassination law" - requiring private, nighttime executions. That law, authored by Minnesota legislator John Day Smith, restricted the number of...

In 1764, Cesare Beccaria, a 26-year-old Italian criminologist, penned On Crimes and Punishments. That treatise spoke out against torture and made the first comprehensive argument against state-sanctioned executions. As we near the 250th anniversary of its publication, law professor John Bessler...

In 2000 when Governor George Ryan unilaterally imposed a statewide moratorium on executions in Illinois, in response to accumulating evidence of more than a dozen wrongfully convicted persons on death row in Illinois. In 1999 the Illinois legislature created the Capital Litigation Trust Fund, to...

Over the past eight years, the use of military commissions at Guantanamo Bay has thrust this rarely used military venue into the forefront of public attention. Legal scholars have increasingly looked to the history of the commissions when addressing the debates over the proper and appropriate...

Australia is set to become the latest in a growing number of countries to join the United States' "coalition of the willing" with respect to the criminalisation of serious cartel conduct. However, there are emerging questions as to whether criminalisation has sufficient support amongst key...

The goal of the Global Impunity Index (GII) is to make visible, in quantitative terms, the impunity worldwide and its relationship with other complex phenomena such as inequality, corruption, and violence. • The GII is the most important international academic effort to measure—in...

This paper criticizes multicausal and penal impunity explanations of violence and crime. It shows the analytical limits of identifying state and social institutional failure with objective causes of violence. But also highlights that impunity indicators cannot be confused with impunity itself....

We document the existence of a gubernatorial election cycle in state executions, suggesting that election year political considerations play a role in determining the timing of executions. Our analysis indicates that states are approximately 25 percent more likely to conduct executions in...