In 1999, Boris Yeltsin commuted the death sentences of all of Russia's 716 death row inmates to life imprisonment as a prerequisite for Russia's admission to the Council. Likewise, the Ukraine, formerly one of the world's execution leaders, abolished the death penalty and joined the Council. Lithuania, Georgia, and many other former republics of the Soviet Union, have now all abolished capital punishment. Consistent with this worldwide trend, South Africa also abolished the death penalty in 1995. If not, the killer unwittingly achieves a final and perverse moral victory of making the state a killer, too, thus reducing social abhorrence at the conscious extinction of a human life.
Abolition is the global trend.
All Western industrialized countries have abolished the death penalty-except for the United States. Here the trend is in the opposite direction with exponentially increasing numbers of executions. The United States has the highest death row population of any country in the world. Currently more than 3,500 people await their deaths at the hands of U.S. authorities, six of them in Montana. In 1998, the United States held the dubious distinction of being in third place worldwide for its number of known executions.