Sangmin Bae is professor of political science at Northeastern Illinois University. She teaches and does research in the areas of human rights, human security, capital punishment, international organizations, and East Asian politics. Her research focuses particularly on the role of political leadership and political institutions in explaining why countries respond differently to international human rights norms. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Comparative Politics, International Journal of Human Rights, Asian Affairs, Pacific Affairs, International Politics, Human Rights Review, and Zeitschrift Fuer Menschenrechte [Journal for Human Rights], among others. She is the author of When the State No Longer Kills: International Human Rights Norms and Abolition of Capital Punishment (SUNY Press, 2007) and Human Security, Changing States and Global Responses (Routledge, 2015).
Bikramjeet Batra is an Indian lawyer and researcher, with a particular interest in capital punishment and other criminal justice-human rights issues. He previously worked at Amnesty International’s Legal and Policy Programme, and the India team - both in London and New Delhi - including authoring a book-length report on the arbitrariness of the death penalty in India (Lethal Lottery: 2008). He studied law at the Universities of Pune and Warwick, and was formerly a visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) and research associate at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (Pune).
Richard Dieter served as the Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. from 1992 until 2015. He authored 40 reports on the death penalty that have been widely cited in the national media and utilized at all levels of state and national government, including the U.S. Supreme Court. His most recent publication, Battle Scars: Military Veterans and the Death Penalty (2015), received the Congressional Black Caucus’s Veterans Braintrust Award. He is currently the Principal Consultant at RDieter Communications. He was a founder of the Pre-Trial Release Program at the Community for Creative Non-violence in Washington and the co-founder of the Alderson Hospitality House in West Virginia for visitors to the country’s main federal women’s prison.
Ariel Dulitzky is Clinical Professor of Law, the Director of the Human Rights Clinic, and the Director of the Latin America Initiative at the University of Texas School of Law. He has dedicated his career to human rights - in both his scholarly research and his legal practice. His extensive expertise is derived from active involvement in the promotion and defense of rights, particularly in the Americas and in international human rights litigation. His publications focus on human rights, the inter-American human rights system, enforced disappearances, afro-descendants and indigenous collective rights, racial discrimination and the rule of law in Latin America. In 2010 he was appointed to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances and elected as its Chair-Rapporteur in 2013 (2013-2015). Prior to joining the University of Texas, he was Assistant Executive Secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Latin America Program Director at the International Human Rights Law Group, and Co-Executive Director of the Center for Justice and International Law.
Evi Girling is a criminologist at the School of Social Science and Public Policy, Keele University, UK with a background in Social Anthropology and Law. Her research is currently organized around two themes: The cultural lives of death in punishment and policing repertoires and local demands and visions of order. Her research on death in punishment focuses on regional and global politics of abolition and more recently on the politics and cultural lives of Life without Parole.
Carolyn Hoyle is Professor of Criminology and Director of the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Green Templeton College. She teaches and researches on the death penalty in all jurisdictions around the world, and has published (along with Professor Roger Hood), the 4th and 5th editions of The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2008; 2015), and various other articles and chapters on capital punishment, including for the United Nations. She is currently working with National Law University, Delhi and the Death Penalty Project, London, on a study of public opinion on the death penalty in India. Her research into applications to the UK post-conviction body, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, concerning alleged miscarriages of justice has been ongoing since 2010 and her book, based on this research (with Mai Sato) will be published by Oxford University Press (Last Resorts: Decisions and Discretion at the Criminal Cases Review Commission) in 2017.
Parvais Jabbar is the co-founder and Co-Executive Director of The Death Penalty Project, a legal action charity based at the London law firm, Simons Muirhead & Burton. For more than twenty years, he specialised in representing prisoners sentenced to death at the appellate level in both criminal and constitutional proceedings before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as well as bringing cases before international tribunals and courts, including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the United Nations Human Rights Committee. He has also worked in assisting local lawyers in final appeals before The Supreme Courts in a number of Commonwealth Countries where capital punishment is retained. He is a founder member of the Pro Bono Panel of the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office which provides legal assistance to British prisoners facing the death penalty and was during its existence a member of the UK Foreign Secretary’s Expert Group on the Death Penalty.
Saul Lehrfreund is the co-founder and Co-Executive Director of The Death Penalty Project, a legal action charity, based at the London law firm, Simons Muirhead and Burton. Since 1992, he has represented prisoners facing the death penalty in criminal and constitutional proceedings before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. He also specializes in international human rights law and has represented prisoners sentenced to death before the United Nations Human Rights Committee and has appeared in proceedings before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court on Human Rights. He regularly assists and provides support to lawyers representing prisoners facing the death penalty in retentionist Commonwealth countries. He is a founder member of the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office Pro Bono Panel providing legal assistance to British nationals facing the death penalty. He was a member of the UK Foreign Secretary’s death penalty panel and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Expert Group on the Death Penalty.
Jim Marcus has represented death-sentenced clients at every level of state and federal habeas corpus proceedings, first with the Texas Resource Center and then with the Texas Defender Service, a non-profit capital defense project he helped found in 1995. He served as the Executive Director of Texas Defender Service from 1997 until stepping down in the summer of 2006 to join the Capital Punishment Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law. In addition to co-directing the Capital Punishment Clinic, he trains and supports capital habeas counsel in Texas cases and lectures in capital defense seminars across the nation.
Michelle Miao is an assistant professor from the Faculty of Law, the Chinese University Hong Kong. Among her research interests are the intersections between the domains of criminology, human rights, socio-legal studies and international law. Her recent scholarship focuses on the administration of criminal law and policies in China and the United States. She studied post-reform capital sentencing process in mainland China. Her research also examined the role of long-term incarceration and the suspended death penalty regime in contemporary China. She has authored book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles published in British Journal of Criminology, Theoretical Criminology, and International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice.
Andrew Novak is term assistant professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at George Mason University. He received an MSc in African Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, a JD from Boston University, and a PhD in law from Middlesex University. He is the author of several books, including The African Challenge to Global Death Penalty Abolition and Comparative Executive Clemency.
Daniel Pascoe is an Assistant Professor at the School of Law, City University of Hong Kong, where his research interests include criminal procedure and sentencing, comparative and international law perspectives on capital punishment, and transitional justice. He graduated with Honours degrees from the Australian National University in Law and in Asian Studies (Indonesian), and received his Doctor of Philosophy in Law from Oxford University in 2013. He has a forthcoming book entitled Last Chance for Life: Clemency in Southeast Asian Death Penalty Cases (Oxford University Press, 2017), and is a Visiting Research Fellow at Fordham Law School during the 2017 Spring Semester.
Michael L. Radelet is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder and a faculty affiliate in CU’s Institute of Behavioral Science. For the past thirty-five years his research has focused on capital punishment, especially the problems of erroneous convictions, racial bias, and ethical issues faced by medical personnel who are involved in capital cases and executions. He has testified in approximately seventy-five death penalty cases, before committees of both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and in legislatures in seven states, and has worked with scores of death row inmates as well as families of homicide victims. His most recent book is The History of the Death Penalty in Colorado (2017).
William Schabas is professor of international law at Middlesex University London and professor of international criminal law and human rights at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He is the author of many books and articles in the area of international human rights law, including The Abolition of the Death Penalty in International Law, now in its third edition. In 2010 and again in 2015 he prepared the five-year report of the United Nations Secretary General on the status of capital punishment in the world.
Raoul Schonemann is a clinical professor and co-director of the Capital Punishment Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law. Since 1991, he has represented people facing the death penalty in Texas, California, Alabama, and Georgia, and at every stage of the state and federal court system. Prior to joining the law school, he was employed as a staff attorney at the Texas Resource Center in Austin; as a deputy public defender at the Office of the State Public Defender in San Francisco; and as the managing attorney of the Capital Litigation Unit at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta. He has been actively involved in efforts to improve the quality of legal representation in capital cases. In 2000, he was a co-author of “The Fair Defense Report: Analysis of Indigent Defense Practices in Texas,” which analyzed then-prevailing practices in indigent defense cases and ultimately contributed to the passage of the Texas Fair Defense Act in 2001. In 2003, he served as a consultant to the American Bar Association in its revision of the “Guidelines for the Appointment and Performance of Counsel in Death Penalty Cases.”
Carol Steiker is the Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Faculty Co-Director of Harvard’s Criminal Justice Policy Program. She specializes in the broad field of criminal justice, where her work ranges from substantive criminal law to criminal procedure to institutional design, with a special focus on issues related to capital punishment. Recent publications address topics such as the relationship of criminal justice scholarship to law reform, the role of mercy in the institutions of criminal justice, and the likelihood of nationwide abolition of capital punishment. Her most recent book, Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment, co-authored with her brother Jordan Steiker, was published by Harvard University Press in November, 2016. In addition to her scholarly work, she has worked on pro bono litigation projects on behalf of indigent criminal defendants, including death penalty cases in the U.S. Supreme Court. She also has served as a consultant and expert witness on issues of criminal justice for non-profit organizations and has testified before Congress and state legislatures and in federal court.
Jordan Steiker teaches constitutional law, criminal law, and death penalty law, and is Co-Director of the Capital Punishment Center at the University of Texas School of Law. He has written extensively on constitutional law, federal habeas corpus, and the death penalty. His new book, Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment, co-authored with his sister Carol Steiker, was published by Harvard University Press in November, 2016. Some of his other recent publications include: “A Tale of Two Nations: Implementation of the Death Penalty in ‘Executing’ Versus ‘Symbolic’ States in the United States,” (Texas Law Review, 2006) (with Carol Steiker); “The Seduction of Innocence: The Attraction and Limitations of the Focus on Innocence in Capital Punishment Law and Advocacy,” (Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 2005) (with Carol Steiker); and “Habeas Exceptionalism,” (Texas Law Review, 2000).
Dirk van Zyl Smit is Professor of Comparative and International Penal Law at the University of Nottingham and is Emeritus Professor of Criminology of the University of Cape Town. In 2012 and 2017 he was Global Professor of Law at New York University. He was project leader of a study of life imprisonment worldwide, which is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. He is chair of the board of Penal Reform International and has acted as adviser on penal matters to the Council of Europe, the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime for its Handbooks on Alternatives to Imprisonment and the International Transfer of Sentenced Prisoners and several national governments. Among his more than 130 academic publications are “Whole Life Sentences and the Tide of European Human Rights Jurisprudence: What is to be Done?” (Human Rights Law Review, 2014) (with Weatherby and Creighton); Taking Life Imprisonment Seriously (Kluwer, 2002); and Principles of European Prison Law and Policy (with Sonja Snacken, Oxford, 2009).
Jon Yorke is Professor of Human Rights and the Director of the Centre for Human Rights at Birmingham City University. He is a member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Expert Group on the Death Penalty, which advises the British government on death penalty matters. He has advised the European Union and the Council of Europe on death penalty issues and has presented on the Secretary General’s Quinquennial Report on Capital Punishment in the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council. He participated in Sudan’s Universal Periodic Review filing on the question of the death penalty and access to fair trials. He is a founding member of the International Academic Network for the Abolition of Capital Punishment and for Amicus’ bi-annual training for the UK legal profession; he teaches the module “International Law and the Death Penalty.” He has published widely on death penalty issues and is a member of the editorial board of the Amicus Journal.
