“The Death Penalty Worldwide website was created by Professor Sandra Babcock in partnership with the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty. The website and database are intended to fill a void in current information about the laws and practices relating to the application of the death penalty around the world. There is a great deal of conflicting information about the death penalty, and at times it is difficult to gauge the accuracy of reports one is able to find by searching the web. Although there are many excellent online sources of information relating to death penalty practices around the world—most notably, reports generated by Amnesty International and the database maintained by Hands Off Cain—none of these are devoted to academic and legal analysis of developments in this field. This resource is not intended to supplant those resources, but to supplement them. The database is the centerpiece of the Death Penalty Worldwide project. It is intended to provide detailed and transparent information regarding the application of the death penalty in law and in practice in every country that retains it. To ensure that database users can judge the reliability and accuracy of our information for themselves, we have provided sources for each fact cited in the database. We hope this will encourage you to notify us when our sources are outdated or inaccurate, and will reassure those who would otherwise be reticent to rely on information that may contradict data gathered by other NGOs, scholars, and institutions. Where appropriate, our researchers have included a brief analysis of legislation and jurisprudence in the country at issue. This is particularly useful in determining which crimes are death-eligible and whether the country has a mandatory death penalty. Answers to these questions are rarely straightforward, particularly in countries that fail to publish judicial decisions and in those that treat information regarding the death penalty as a state secret.”