Researching the Death Penalty in Closed or Partially-Closed Criminal Justice Systems

Abstract

For comparative death penalty scholarship to move forward and to continue to contribute meaningfully to the global abolitionist movement in the 21st century, scholars must learn to work with decreasing amounts of official data, shifting their focus away from the United States and Japan to less well-documented sites where death penalty information is difficult to come by. In the past, such jurisdictions have commonly been cast into the ‘too hard basket’. Today they are imperative targets for our study, in order to further expose these stubborn holdouts on the death penalty to international scrutiny. Yet the methodological problems in covering them are significant.Drawing from the author’s experience conducting doctoral fieldwork in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand (four jurisdictions evincing various levels of opacity in their criminal justice practices) together with the collection of data on Vietnam (where death penalty statistics are a state secret), this chapter begins by critiquing the limited breadth of comparative death penalty scholarship today. The author then addresses the methodological problems in dealing with quantitative and qualitative information that is absent, unreliable, or difficult to obtain, and how these problems might be overcome within future comparative studies of capital punishment.