The death penalty is rapidly receding in the former British colonies of common-law Africa. Although proposals to institute or retain the death penalty for a wide assortment of crimes are not uncommon, actual judicial executions have grown extremely rare south of the Sahara Desert. The death penalty has fallen into disuse in most of common-law Africa, and many of these countries are now considered de facto abolitionist. As in other parts of the retentionist world, death-penalty abolition is an incremental process, nurtured more by small steps—stays of execution, grants of clemency, judicial clarification—than by dramatic ones, the most important of which for the continent of Africa was the 1995 decision of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, deeming the death penalty unconstitutional. Upon independence, former British colonies inherited nearly identical constitutions drafted at Lancaster House in London, each of which specifically saved the death penalty from constitutional challenge. Although common-law African constitutions have been written and rewritten since independence during the eras of oneparty rule in the 1970s, of economic adjustment in the 1980s, and democratization in the 1990s, most former British colonies retain similar constitutional and legal structures, including retention of the death penalty in national penal codes. The mandatory death penalty, a relic of nineteenth century Britain, is the most constitutionally vulnerable aspect of African deathpenalty regimes, and is facing sustained challenge in a number of countries. . .
