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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Selectivity and racial bias in a mandatory death sentence dispensation: a South African case study |
Authors: | Zimring, Franklin E. Van Vuren, Johannes Van Rooyen, Jan H. |
Year: | 1995 |
Periodical: | The Comparative and International Law Journal of Southern Africa |
Volume: | 28 |
Issue: | 1 |
Pages: | 107-112 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subject: | capital punishment |
Abstract: | This contribution reports an analysis of prosecution, sentencing, and execution data for the Republic of South Africa during the late 1980s. The data are of special interest for three reasons. First, the authors document the operation of a judicial system that was administering a death sentence statute that was essentially a mandatory model in cases of murder. Second, the statistics show a pattern of selectivity depending on the race of a homicide victim that is as extreme as any to be found in the world literature on the death sentence. Finally, the outcome seriously challenges the constitutionality not only of the death sentence dispensation that is the focus of the study, but even more pertinently of the present South African death sentence dispensation with its wider discretion. The major problem in the administration of a death penalty is the essentially arbitrary difference between the large number of murder cases where death is not the punishment and the few cases where execution will occur. The new South African death sentence dispensation creates more uncontrolled discretion and the problems of the death sentence as an uncontrolled selective system leading to unequal protection of the law are therefore likely to be exacerbated. Notes, ref. |