Amnesty International has launched its most recent report on Death sentences and executions in 2014. In their annual report they publish the minimum figures of recorded death sentences and executions that they are able to verify. For producing a Worldmapper-style cartogram, absolute numbers are essential of course, which requires some decisions to be made which numbers go into the map transformation. For the following two maps, showing the death penalty executions and sentences in 2014, the minimum figures of validated cases provided in the report were used, or, where these were not stated, the estimated figures as stated in the report were used instead (China was set to 1000 to not dominate the cartogram entirely, even if the number is believed to be much higher than that). The maps therefore need to be seen as a general picture of the state of death penalty in the world, rather than the exact reality. As stated by Amnesty, “the real number of people executed is much higher. There are no figures for China, for example, which is believed to execute more people than the rest of the world put together. Other countries like Belarus also execute prisoners in secret, often without informing the detainees’ relatives or lawyers.”
Tag Archives: capital punishment
Walking Dead: Capital Punishment
Amnesty International has recently released their latest report on executions and sentences around the world during 2010 (pdf) stating that ” it is clear that countries using the death penalty are now increasingly isolated” (see also here, the underlying data has also been added to the Guardian Datastore).
The following two maps show a worldmapper-style view of the state of death penalty using figures from the time of 2007 to 2010 out of the above mentioned sources. There are two pictures that can be drawn from the data: The first map shows the countries of the world resized according to the total death penalty sentences recorded there in that time period (the map inset shows the state of death penalty around the world on a conventional map). The second map visualises the actually executed death penalties from 2007-2010 by resizing the countries accordingly (the map inset here shows a world population cartogram that allows a comparison of the main map with the actual population distribution).
In both maps the figures for China are uncertain and estimated to be in the thousands. China has been set to 1000 in both maps and may thus appear much smaller than it actually is related to this topic.
The two maps with their very distorted shape of the world show how divided the world is in this topic. Very few countries dominate the map while the majority of countries disappear completely. Europe and South America are literally eradicated, and when looking at the actually executed death penalties in the second map, even more countries vanish:
