Special Troika of the Krasnoyarsk NKVD: the Number of the Repressed in the Fall of 1938

The research featured the Special Troika of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, i.e. a committee of three officials who issued sentences without public trial. The authors focused on the number of the convicted on the so-called ethnic cases during the late Great Terror in the fall of 1938. The study was based on the archival documents of the Special Troika of the Krasnoyarsk Territory. According to the protocols, 1,894 local residents were found guilty in the ethnic cases in in the fall of 1938. Out of 1,690 people who were sentenced to capital punishment, less than 1% were executed. On November 26, 1938, the NKVD issued Order No. 00762, which marked the end of the Great Terror and recommended to transfer the remaining cases to the courts. Those convicted on the last day of mass repressions were released, and the NKVD authorities were forbidden to carry out sentences approved by the Special Troika after November 15, 1938. On December 22, 1938, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs L. P. Beria declared that all execution sentences issued by the Troika before November 17, 1928, became invalid.

Article 37: Prohibition of Torture, Capital Punishment, and Arbitrary Deprivation of Liberty

Article 37 is inspired by the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). However, it extends the ICCPR’s provisions to the protection of the children by: (1) imposing the prohibition of life imprisonment for children without the possibility of release; (2) demanding that detention of a child shall be used as a measure of last resort and be imposed for the shortest period of time; and (3) providing to children deprived of liberty the right to maintain contacts with their family members. Article 37 imposes a child-centred understanding of its provisions and rights. These rights extend beyond the ambit of child justice administration to all situations where children may be deprived of liberty, including, for example, child protection settings, health care settings, and immigration settings. This chapter analyses Article 37 rights in accordance with four essential attributes, as enumerated in its four constituent paragraphs: (1) the prohibition in paragraph (a) on torture or ill-treatment, specifically ruling out capital punishment and life imprisonment without parole for minors; (2) the prohibition in paragraph (b) of unlawful and arbitrary deprivations of liberty, insisting that such sanctions are a measure of last resort that must only be imposed for the shortest appropriate period; (3) the limitations on the deprivation of liberty, including the core commitment in paragraph (c) to upholding the child’s inherent dignity and right to be treated with humanity in such circumstances; and (4) the right, in paragraph (d), to minimal due process guarantees which must accompany any child’s deprivation of liberty. While youth criminal justice practice varies greatly from state to state, Articles 37 and 40 have emerged as a codification of global standards set out in the Beijing Rules and a summary prompt to the adoption of guidelines and minimum rules for the protection of children deprived of liberty and the prevention of youth crime. Article 37 should therefore be applied consistently with the recent General Comment no. 24 (2019) on Children’s Rights in the Child Justice System.

Legal Comparison against the Death Penalty Sanctions regulated in the Positive Laws of Indonesia and China

Corruption is a severe problem worldwide, so it takes a strict rule of law and strong law enforcement efforts to eradicate it. China's legal system has proven to be effective in reducing corruption among state officials. One of China's anti-corruption efforts is to impose harsh penalties on perpetrators, including the death penalty. In light of this success, this study will conduct a legal comparison with the death penalty, which is regulated in Indonesian and Chinese positive law. The type of research used is normative juridical with a conceptual and statute approach. The data processed in this study include primary data and secondary data with data collection techniques and management using a literature review. The findings of this study highlight the threat of the Death Penalty, as outlined in Article 2 Paragraph (2) of the Corruption Crime Act, which focuses on corrupt acts committed under certain conditions. In Indonesia, no one has ever been sentenced to death for corruption. The People's Republic of China's Criminal Law of the death penalty threat has existed since 1900 AD. Article 383 of the Chinese Criminal Code stipulates that anyone who accepts bribes is subject to the death penalty. A significant difference from this Comparison lies in the classification of capital punishment with a corruption amount of more than 50,000 Yuan and for bribery cases in Chinese regulations. Meanwhile, there is no such regulation in Article 2 paragraph (2) of the Indonesian Corruption Laws.

Testing Death Penalty Opinions With General Questions and A Specific Case Scenario: Potential Lessons From China

Despite rich literature on public opinion on capital punishment, only a few studies examined people’s death penalty support within specific contexts. None have explored if correlates that influence people’s opinion would hold the same effect in general questions and specific case scenarios. Similarly, the Marshall hypotheses have not been tested with specific crime scenarios. Based on a sample of 1,077 students in a quasiexperimental design, this study contrasts Chinese students’ death penalty opinion in general questions with a specific crime scenario, and tests the Marshall hypotheses with the latter. Compared to their support in general questions, students’ support for death sentences dropped significantly in the specific crime scenario. Multivariate analyses showed that different factors influenced people’s decisions in the general questions and in the specific case, and respondents’ choices of preferred punishment in the specific crime scenario failed to lend support to the Marshall hypotheses.

Class and Complex Transmedia Character in the Early Victorian Period: Jack Sheppard (1839-40)

The reception of William Harrison Ainsworth’s novel, Jack Sheppard (1839-1840), was contemporaneously deemed a mania and has been described by critics today as a moral panic over the influence of fiction. Several adaptations of Ainsworth’s novel across media ambiguously depict Jack’s hanging, and the adaptations that most clearly show his survival occur in those versions that are least legally defensible and most clearly targeted toward the labouring classes. In this essay, I analyse Buckstone and Greenwood’s melodramas at the Adelphi and Sadler’s Wells, respectively, in autumn 1839; two penny press novelisations of Jack Sheppard published in 1839 and 1840; and an anonymous melodrama staged at the City of London Theatre in 1845, which was shut down due to violating the licensing ban on Jack Sheppard titles. From contemporary accounts of the mania, I argue that audience members treated historical and fictional accounts of Jack as describing the same entity, which created the space for specifying new facts and thus claiming new meaning. I therefore see Jack Sheppard as a transmedia character. For the labouring classes, claiming new meaning sometimes inhered in Jack’s defiance of capital punishment. This transmedial extension of Ainsworth’s character by working-class audiences in the penny press and cheap theatre pointed to the inadequacies of Victorian copyright law to protect the creative property of originating authors across media, and thus disturbed Victorian middle and upper-class literary critics because they saw the lower class’s celebration of a criminal as threatening to undermine their social order. Using the concept of transmedia in this period allows us to see how enthusiastic audience members in the working classes created what I term character complexity as they built a palimpsest out of the panoply of cross-media character representations. This transmedia character complexity matters because it is an avenue for oppressed communities to reclaim their dignity through narrative meaning-making.

Right to Life and Capital Punishment in Transnational Judicial Dialogue

In this article, I bring the constitutional jurisprudence of major East Asian courts into reconstructive dialogue with that of the United States, South Africa, and several former Soviet-bloc countries, on per se review of capital punishment. This fills in a gap in the literature, which has failed to reflect new developments in Asia. Besides analysing various review approaches, I extrapolate recurrent analytical issues and reconstruct dialogues among these court decisions. Moreover, I place the analysis in historical perspective by periodising the jurisprudential trajectory of the right to life. The contextualised reconstructive dialogues offer multilayered understanding of my central analytical argument: for any court that may conduct per se review of capital punishment in the future, the highly influential South African Makwanyane case does not settle the lesson. The transnational debate has been kept open by the Korean Constitutional Court's decisions, as well as retrospectively by the US cases of Furman and Gregg. This argument has two major points. First, the crucial part of the reasoning in Makwanyane, namely that capital punishment cannot be proven to pass the necessity test under the proportionality review, is analytically inconclusive. The Korean Constitutional Court's decision offers a direct contrast to this point. Second, the exercise of proportionality review of the Makwanyane Court does not attest to the neutrality and objectivity of proportionality review. Rather, what is really dispositive of the outcome are certain value choices inhering in per se review of capital punishment.

Purging the Evil from Israel: The Function of the Deuteronomic Formula in Judg 20:13

This article argues for the importance of the purging formula in Judg 20:13. In the Deuteronomic Code, this formula provides the motivation for capital punishment in two areas relevant to the Judges narrative: first, apostasy and incitement to it, and, second, the perversion of Deuteronomic legal procedures. This study argues that both motifs are present in and important to Judges’ rendering of the Sodom-like outrage in Gibeah. The first is obvious. With regard to the second, the article argues that the Israelites err in their investigation of the case, and therefore their decisions and subsequent action lead to more violence and confusion. It is further argued that the triple oracular inquiry of YHWH in Judg 20:18–28 is presented as an inadequate substitute for proper forensic adjudication; it therefore does not lead to the establishment of order and justice.

Capital Punishment for Drug Abuse Crime: Legal Limitations and Requirements

I write this paper about the death penalty for narcotics dealers, many countries still apply the death penalty like one of them is Indonesia, although many criticize the execution of capital punishment for drug dealers, but the death penalty is still done in Indonesia, because it is believed to be the most appropriate step for the drug dealers who have damaged this generation of Indonesian nation, and in this paper I justify or approve if the drug dealer is sentenced to death because the drugs damage the young generation and damage the nation's morale.