2. Light blue =
no DP in 10 yrs
Brown = DP only for times of war
Orange = DP for adult offenders
Red = DP for adult and juvenile offenders
Dark blue =
abolitionist
*Amnesty
International (2012)
3. Political oppression against ethnic Kurds and Shiite
Muslims
Ethnic Cleansing: extermination of the Kurds was one
of his administration's highest priorities.
The Dujail Massacre of 1982: the slaughter of over 148
civilians and dozens of children
Genocide: The al-Anfal Campaign (slaughter of
180,000 Kurds)
The Post-Uprising Massacres of 1991 : Killing of
2000 suspected Kurdish rebels
4. In December 2003, the Coalition Provisional
Authority creates the Iraqi Special Tribunal,
consisting of five Iraqi judges, to try Saddam
Hussein and his aides for charges of war crimes,
crimes against humanity, and genocide.
On 5 November 2006, Saddam is sentenced to death
by hanging for the killing of 148 Shiites from Dujail.
100’s of Iraqis apply for the job of ‘hangman’.
On 30 December 2006, Saddam Hussein is executed
by hanging at Camp Justice.
All other charges of war crimes and genocide are
dropped.
5. The practice of capital punishment must promote
the reduction of crime, or else it is not justifiable.
If a murderer is dead, then he can never harm
anyone again. Capital punishment is the ultimate
incapacitation of a murderer.
Since many human beings’ greatest fear is death,
the threat of capital punishment can also deter
potential murderers.
However, it doesn’t take into account important
factors such as justice…
6. “It is just the principle of equality, by which the
pointer of the scale of justice is made to incline
no more to the one side than the other. It may be
rendered by saying that the undeserved evil
which any one commits on another is to be
regarded as perpetrated on himself. Hence it
may be said:
If you slander another, you slander yourself;
if you steal from another, you steal from
yourself; if you strike another, you strike
yourself; if you kill another, you kill
yourself."1. Kant, Immanuel. “Justice and Punishment.” Trans. W. Hastie. In Philosophical Perspectives on Punishment.
Ed. Gertrude Ezorsky. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972. 102-106.
7. Lex Talionis requires imposing a harm on a criminal
identical to the one he imposed on his victim.
Applying Lex Talionis to the crimes of dictators and
war criminals is, at the very least, problematic.
How is simply hanging Saddam bring justice to the
amount of suffering he inflicted on hundreds of
thousands of people?
8. Executing Saddam would involve the destruction of
evidence:
“The trial of Saddam Hussein, like those of
Pinochet and Milosevic, ought to have been the
occasion for the assembling of a huge and
conclusive archive of evidence, which would
stand for all time as a monument to justice and
an insurance against later "revisionism.”
-Christopher Hitchens
2.Hitchens, C. (2006, November 6). Don't hang Saddam. Retrieved April 29, 2015, from
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/11
Editor's Notes
You’ll see that Europe is DP-free except for Belarus. In fact, you can’t join the EU if you have the DP.
Latin America is almost DP-free and much of Africa has stopped using the DP
