In custodial contexts, the duty of states to protect the most fundamental right – to life – is heightened. Nevertheless, prisoner deaths are a universal and frequent concern. The mortality rate among the 11.5 million prisoners globally is up to 50% higher than amongst non-imprisoned persons, forming a human rights and health equity concern. It is therefore peculiar that prisoner deaths have attracted only piecemeal scholarly attention. In this article, we problematize epistemologies of prisoner death, highlighting obfuscations and agglomerations in existing datasets based on poor definitions, reductive statistics and constrained medico-legal categorizations. We provide a springboard towards a new epistemological approach that makes the scale and breadth of prisoner deaths and deceased prisoner characteristics more visible to facilitate prevention. We advance three tenets: count prisoners who die rather than deaths in prison, disaggregate prisoner death data through rights-informed dimensions and adopt explicitly defined, mutually exclusive categorizations.
International prisoners can apply for early release. However, terminally ill prisoners seeking release in the international criminal justice system face significant legal and practical obstacles. This is particularly the case for prisoners convicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC): there is currently no framework for granting compassionate release prior to serving the statutory required amount of a sentence. To build a foundation for recommendations for the creation of a system of compassionate release at the ICC, this article critically examines the systems used to grant early release to terminally ill persons in international (International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals) and national criminal law, with a particular focus on how these systems operate for prisoners that have served less than the typical eligibility requirement for release. This article sets out a normative basis for creating a novel and distinct form of release at the ICC: a compassionate system based, not on penological justifications, but on the impossibility of continued detention on human rights grounds. It concludes with recommendations for essential substantial and procedural elements for this system and means of incorporating it into the current legal framework.
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