四虎影视

Center for Death Penalty Studies

College of Arts and Sciences

Projects and Activities

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The Center for Death Penalty Studies has run a wide range of projects all over the world.

Death penalty in the Middle Eastern countries

The death penalty in the Middle East is familiar to most people because capital punishment exists in the domestic law of most Middle Eastern countries, but the ways by which these states employ capital punishment are varied and inconsistent. The primary goal of this project is to use a comparative approach by illustrating the similarities and differences in the practice of capital punishment over time and place in the Middle Eastern countries. We will review the current practice of death penalty in both Islamic states and secular Middle Eastern countries. The second goal is to find out why capital punishment is less in practice in some Middle Eastern countries.

Juveniles on death row

The aim of this project is to provide a background of the evolution of juvenile death penalty policy, an empirical profile of executing children in the political and Islamic criminal justice systems, and an analysis of the factors that may influence future of capital punishment as a criminal sanction. Eighteen years is the internationally accepted minimum age for the imposition of capital punishment. According to Amnesty International, since 1990, only nine countries in the world are known to have executed juvenile offenders: China, Congo, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan and the United States. The continuing executions of juvenile offenders continued in two Islamic countries: Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Victims families speak against the death penalty

This research focuses on the role of victims' families in Capital cases.  

Death Penalty Courses offered at LU

  • Death Penalty (Undergraduate)
  • The Current Scholarship on Capital Punishment (Graduate)
  • Death Penalty Clinic (Graduate)
Dr. Alasti Courses

Center for Death Penalty Studies represented LU at the following conferences

  • The Future of Capital Punishment, South Western Association of Criminal Justice Conference, Houston, TX, October 2019.
  • The Future of Capital Punishment, Southern Criminal Justice Association Conference, Pensacola, FL, September 2018.
  • Cruel and Unusual Punishments: Comparative Perspective, Southern Criminal Justice Association Conference, New Orleans, LA, September 2017.
  • Middle Eastern Harshness in the Application of Death Penalty, Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, New Orleans, LA, November 2016.
  • Relationship Between Social Movements and the Capital Punishment in the Middle East, Annual Meeting of Law and Society Association, New Orleans, LA, June 2016.
  • Capital Punishment in Authoritarian Regimes, Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Washington D.C., November 2015.
  • Death Penalty in the Middle Eastern Countries, Contemporary Issues of Criminal Justice Systems Workshop, Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Onati, Spain, May 2015.
  • Women and the Death Penalty: Comparative Perspective, Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Conference, Orlando, FL, March 2015.
  • Capital Punishment and Super Due Process, UCLA Death Penalty Conference, Los Angeles, CA, May 2014.