Johnson, an expert on law and society in Asia, and Franklin E. Zimring, a senior authority on capital punishment, combine detailed case studies of the death penalty in Asian nations with cross-national
comparisons to identify the critical factors for the future of Asian death penalty policy. The clear trend is away from reliance on state execution and many nations with death penalties in their criminal codes rarely use it. Only the hard-line authoritarian regimes of China, Vietnam, Singapore, and North Korea execute with any frequency, and when authoritarian states experience democratic reforms, the rate of executions drops sharply, as in Taiwan and South Korea. Debunking the myth of "Asian
values," Johnson and Zimring demonstrate that politics, rather than culture or tradition, is the major obstacle to the end of executions. Carefully researched and full of valuable lessons, The Next
Frontier is the authoritative resource on the death penalty in Asia for scholars, policymakers, and advocates around the world.
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