In the Americas, the death penalty has been almost entirely banned. Since Cuba ceased executions in 2003, only two countries in the region have carried out a death sentence. One is the United States, which routinely appears in Amnesty International’s list of the world’s top 5 executioners.
The other outlier in the Americas? The tiny Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis.
The Anglophone island nation executed Charles Laplace in Dec. 2008 for the murder of his wife, reported the Guardian. The circumstances of Laplace’s execution raised criticism from human rights groups and local politicians about a lack of due process in Laplace’s trial. But despite such concerns, the country reiterated its support of the death penalty after a 2011 review.
Although the US and St. Kitts and Nevis are the only American countries to carry out executions recently, several other nations retain their capital punishment laws, including Cuba, Guatemala, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana. Mexico and Argentina most recently abolished the death penalty, in 2005 and 2008 respectively.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
