On April 1, 1999, a judge in the Zhytomyr Regional Court in Ukraine began reading a verdict that would take twelve hours. When he finished, Anatoly Onoprienko, 39, stood sentenced to death for fifty-two murders. Relatives of the dead were in the courtroom. Nine months later the Constitutional Court of Ukraine ruled that the death penalty itself was unconstitutional, and the sentence the Zhytomyr court had delivered after a four-month trial was a piece of paper with no future.
The same thing happened, in different forms, in other countries. A serial case would reach its verdict, or its sentencing, or its appeal, and somewhere else in the capital the state would change what it was willing to do. Sometimes a legislature acted, sometimes a court, sometimes a president or a king. The families of the dead did not usually see it as progress, and in several of these cases they said so in public. Eight cases from Ukraine, Turkey, Russia, Chile, Denmark, Latvia and Taiwan show what each change did to the particular sentence in front of it. In only a few of the eight did abolition arrive between the verdict and the end of the case. In the others it came just before, just after, or, in Taiwan, not at all. The timing is set out case by case.
Anatoly Onoprienko was convicted of fifty-two murders committed in two periods: nine between June 14 and August 16, 1989, and forty-three between October 5, 1995 and March 22, 1996, together with robbery, theft and other counts. He was arrested in Yavoriv, in the Lviv region, in April 1996. The Zhytomyr Regional Court tried him from November 23, 1998 to March 31, 1999. He spoke of a higher total, but the court’s figure of fifty-two is the one that stands.
His trial ran across a political deadline. When Ukraine joined the Council of Europe in November 1995, Amnesty International recorded, it promised to abolish the death penalty and to halt executions in the meantime. Executions continued for a time. A halt in practice began in March 1997. The Council of Europe’s deadline for full abolition, November 1998, passed while the trial was under way. Amnesty International’s statement on the case, issued on November 26, 1998, was directed at the president. In a media interview around the time the trial opened, Leonid Kuchma had said, "As a human being I cannot see any punishment for him other than death." Amnesty said the remark violated the independence of the judiciary and the defendant’s presumption of innocence, put the halt on executions at risk, and asked for an independent psychiatric examination because of reports that Onoprienko might be mentally ill. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty carried the same criticism.
The trial itself was difficult. The state assigned a lawyer, Ruslan Moshkovsky of Zhytomyr, who was paid 17 hryvnias a day; the law required a defender in a capital case. About 310 witnesses and 150 people recognized as victims took part, Moshkovsky said, and journalists came from many countries. In the first week of December, ZN.ua reported, Onoprienko tried to dismiss his lawyer, demanding a replacement over fifty, Jewish or partly Jewish, financially independent and experienced abroad. The court refused. The first witness, a co-defendant tried only for the 1989 episodes, told the court that his statements to investigators had been obtained by psychological and physical pressure. He was later sentenced to thirteen years, reduced to twelve on appeal, and released in 2008.
The verdict is dated March 31, 1999. The Suspilne archive records that the judge read it on April 1 and that the reading took twelve hours. The court held Onoprienko guilty on all counts and sentenced him to death. Espreso reported that relatives in the courtroom demanded his execution. Moshkovsky, who considered the sentence fair, filed a cassation appeal to the Supreme Court of Ukraine for professional reasons, he said in 2006. In August 1999 the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence.
What came next was a matter of months. On December 29, 1999, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine ruled the death penalty unconstitutional. (ZN.ua gives December 30.) In 2000 parliament removed it from the Criminal Code, and life imprisonment came into force on April 4, 2000, as the Supreme Court of Ukraine later stated. The Suspilne archive says Onoprienko’s sentence was replaced with life imprisonment after Kuchma signed the abolition into law in 2000. Espreso reported that the president, having said in 1998 that death was the only punishment he could see, sought an exception for Onoprienko from the Council of Europe and was refused. The date of the order that changed this particular sentence has not been reported.
So the sequence for Ukraine is precise. The verdict and the Supreme Court’s confirmation came after the halt on executions and after the Council of Europe’s deadline, and before the Constitutional Court’s ruling. The man was condemned in an abolition that had begun and not yet been completed. The relatives who demanded his execution in the courtroom in April 1999 were asking for something the state had already stopped doing.
The manhunt left another casualty. In March 1996 an innocent young man, identified in the reports only by the initials Yu. M., was arrested in Horodok, near Lviv, and died in custody after being mistreated, according to Radio Svoboda. The men responsible were later punished, the station said, though their names and sentences were not reported. In 2002 the Frankivskyi District Court in Lviv ordered the regional security service directorate to pay 100,000 hryvnias and the regional prosecutor’s office 30,000, split between his parents, as Radio Svoboda described it the first time in independent Ukraine that a court had ordered investigative bodies to compensate the family of a person who died under their mistreatment. The prosecutor’s office said it would appeal. The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group reported the award in December 2002.
Onoprienko served the rest of his life in Zhytomyr prison No. 8, built in 1914, which by 2011 held more than 160 men serving life sentences, LB.ua reported. A life prisoner in Ukraine could apply for a pardon only after twenty years, and none had reached that point by 2011. Espreso reported that Onoprienko spent about thirteen years in solitary confinement. Interfax-Ukraine and ZN.ua reported his death there on August 27, 2013, at 54; the preliminary cause was a heart attack.
The Turkish case shows the opposite problem: abolition did not fall on a single sentence at all, because the state had already arranged another way to avoid carrying it out.
Adnan Colak admitted killing eleven elderly people in the province of Artvin, in northeastern Turkey, between 1992 and 1995. The people he killed were between 68 and 95, according to the national papers Milliyet and Posta, which have returned to the case several times since. The Zonguldak 1st Heavy Penal Court tried him in proceedings that lasted about five years and sentenced him to death six times, with a long prison term on top. The reports disagree on that term. Milliyet in 2009, Memurlar.net in 2013 and Webtekno in 2024 give 112 years of heavy imprisonment. Posta’s 2010 summary gives 40 years. Which of the eleven killings each death sentence covered, why there were six sentences rather than eleven, any appeal, and the date on which the judgment became final have not been reported. Webtekno says six of the eleven were women, Habertürk says all eleven were, and Gazete Vatan in 2006 says elderly couples were among them. Colak’s own date of birth was not reported; Milliyet and Memurlar.net say he was 25 when the killings began. Sevinc Yavuz, a researcher quoted by Gazete Vatan in 2006, described him as an uneducated shepherd.
Because the dates of the trial and the verdict have never been reported, the position of his death sentences against the abolition cannot be fixed. What they do establish is the legal background. Turkey had carried out no judicial execution since 1984, Human Rights Watch noted in August 2002, although courts went on passing death sentences. On August 2, 2002, the Turkish parliament abolished the death penalty for all offenses committed in peacetime and replaced it with life imprisonment. Human Rights Watch reported that eighty-three prisoners on death row were reprieved, among them Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the PKK. How these changes affected his own sentences has not been reported.
What is known is that he walked out of prison on May 28, 2005. Posta’s 2018 gallery and a DHA report printed by Gazete Vatan in August 2018 attribute the release to the conditional release provision known as the Rahsan affi, the Rahsan amnesty, and Webtekno repeated in June 2024 that he was freed in 2005 under the same law, despite six death sentences and 112 years.
The law had its own history. Law No. 4616, on conditional release and the suspension of cases and sentences for crimes committed up to April 23, 1999, was adopted by the Turkish parliament on December 21, 2000, and published in the Resmi Gazete, the official gazette, the next day. Its first article provided that death sentences for crimes committed before that date would not be carried out, and that ten years would be deducted, once, from the terms of people sentenced to life or to other prison terms. Prisoners who had then served the rest of their time were to be released. A long list of offenses was excluded. Colak’s crimes, committed between 1992 and 1995, fall before that cutoff; whether his release rested on the deduction, on a later reduction of his sentence after abolition, or on both, has not been reported.
The law took its popular name from Rahsan Ecevit, the wife of Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit. A December 2025 report in Karar, on the law’s history, said the proposal grew out of a news story she had read about a two-year-old girl who spent her days in a kindergarten and her nights in prison with her mother, who was serving a 27-year sentence. President Suleyman Demirel vetoed the first version parliament passed, Karar reported, and the bill went through on a second attempt after prison riots. Prisons with room for about 70,000 inmates were left holding about 40,000, though the number rose again by more than twenty thousand within three years. In July 2001 the Constitutional Court ruled on challenges to the law. Its deputy president, Hasim Kilic, announced that the court considered it a conditional release law rather than an amnesty, and the court’s rulings partly widened its reach, Bianet reported at the time.
Where Colak went after leaving prison, whether he returned to Artvin, and whether he is alive have not been reported. They describe no later court case involving him. Turkish features on the case repeat the same small stock of facts: eleven people, the ages of 68 to 95, the five-year trial, the sentences. Of the eight cases here, his is the one in which the death penalty ended without anyone being able to say what it ended for.
Russia stopped using the death penalty through a moratorium and did not abolish it. The distinction mattered in two of these cases, and it mattered differently in each.
### Alexander Maslich, sentenced twice
Alexander Maslich, from Altai Krai in southern Siberia, killed men he was held with, and the Barnaul and Altai press reported that all of his killings were committed in custody except the first. Altapress, in 2021, gave the total as five, and Novaya Gazeta Europe, in 2023, said four. Altapress says that in 1991, at the Kueta colony, he killed a cellmate, which added twelve years to his term and made him a repeat offender. The next case Altapress describes took place at Barnaul pretrial detention center No. 1, and the paper gives no date for it.
In July 1994, at Rubtsovsk, a fellow prisoner named Alexei Dzyuba, 23, was killed in a cell Maslich shared with two other men. Interfax reported that the court that sentenced Maslich in July 1995, in a story printed by The Moscow Times on July 25, tried the case as murder and cannibalism. The two men in the dock said they had done it in the hope of being sent to Moscow and declared insane. Psychiatrists at the Serbsky Center concluded that the cannibalism had been simulated and judged Maslich sane. He was sentenced to death. His accomplice received fifteen years. The judge told Interfax it was the first case of cannibalism among convicts he had dealt with. Altapress, in 2003 and 2021, and Amic, in 2023, give the same two sentences, though Altapress in 2021 dates them to 1996.
In May 1996, while on death row in Barnaul, Maslich killed a cellmate. On December 26, 1996, Interfax reported that he had received a second death sentence; The Spokesman-Review printed the agency’s report the next day. At the Altai regional court, Interfax said, he explained that he had acted in the hope of being declared insane, which he believed would spare him execution for the earlier killing. The agency described him as a four-time convicted murderer and did not name the victim. A prisoner already under sentence of death had been condemned a second time.
Then came the moratorium. Altapress, in a sidebar headed "The Rubtsovsk cannibal was left alive," reported in 2003 that he fell under the moratorium of 1997, so that his death sentence was replaced by life imprisonment. He served the term at the colony known as the Black Dolphin, at Sol-Iletsk in Orenburg Oblast. A 2023 article in Novaya Gazeta Europe, based largely on the account of a former prisoner there, wrote that lists of the crimes of the men inside were posted at their cell doors, and named Maslich among them, credited with four killings. Altapress reported in 2021 that he died there in 2015; the cause was not made public.
The timing here is the cleanest of any case among the eight. His first sentence, in 1995, and his second, in December 1996, were both passed before the moratorium the Barnaul press dates to 1997. Both judgments were made while the sentence still had a future and both lost it within months. A court cannot be said to have misjudged anything. It had applied the law as it stood.
### Dmitry Voronenko, sentenced in 2008
By March 2008 the ground had shifted again. The moratorium was no longer new, and a St. Petersburg court cited it from the bench.
On March 20, 2008, the St. Petersburg City Court sentenced Dmitry Voronenko to life imprisonment for the murders, with other charges, of four girls and young women, aged 11, 12, 18 and 20, committed in the city between late 2006 and May 2007. The prosecution had asked for the death penalty, calling the case one of the rare ones in which it would truly be justified. The court, pointing to the moratorium on executions, imposed the most severe punishment still open to it, Interfax reported that day. A fifth episode, concerning a 17-year-old who survived, was also charged. Voronenko, a citizen of Ukraine born in the Kirghiz SSR and 36 when arrested in May 2007, had been tried in 2004 and released in 2005 on parole, and all of the later crimes were committed during that conditional release; the court counted it as an aggravating circumstance. Interfax gave those details at the time of the sentence, and Moskovsky Komsomolets later published his criminal record.
The families did not accept the outcome. The parents of the dead girls said unanimously that they were unhappy with it. One mother told reporters they had expected the court to respect the moratorium and substitute life imprisonment, but they still could not accept it. Voronenko’s lawyer called the court’s position correct and civilized. The prosecutor, by then, described life imprisonment as a fair punishment, Interfax reported. The parents went to the Supreme Court of Russia, asking for the death penalty. It refused and left the life sentence in force, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported in 2024, and the mothers went on to campaign for the return of capital punishment.
There was a second obstacle before the first. Moskovsky Komsomolets reported on January 18, 2008, citing the radio station Echo of Moscow, that when the trial opened he had declined a trial by jury. The same report noted that the victims' parents wanted the moratorium set aside in his case, and pointed out that under Russian law at the time a death sentence could be passed only with a jury. So the question of the moratorium might never have arisen at all had he not given up the jury. Whether the court’s invocation of it was the controlling reason, or one reason among two, has never been settled.
Voronenko served his term at the special colony for life prisoners in Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, known as Polar Owl. On March 27, 2024, he was charged with the murder, with other charges, of a schoolgirl in St. Petersburg in September 2006, to which he had confessed from prison, OSN reported, citing TASS. A court in St. Petersburg ordered him held in pretrial detention until June 4, 2024. The paper’s correspondent suggested that the confession was partly a way to leave the Arctic colony for a time and expected a second life sentence. That is the paper’s inference, not a finding, and the outcome of the new charge has not been reported.
Chile gives the clearest example of abolition arriving before the verdict, with consequences that appeared only at sentencing.
Julio Perez Silva was arrested on October 4, 2001, in the far north of Chile. Within days he had confessed to killing fourteen girls and women from Alto Hospicio, a fast-growing settlement on the plateau overlooking the port city of Iquique. Most were teenagers; Meganoticias counted eleven adolescents and three adults. On February 26, 2004, Judge Eliana Ayala in Iquique convicted him of fourteen aggravated homicides and the attempted homicide of a girl who survived, with other charges.
For close to three years, police and senior officials told the families that the girls had probably run away from troubled families. The families, most of them poor, said they had been treated with contempt because of where they lived. The government later apologized, and a congressional human rights commission acknowledged that the young women had been stigmatized. The day after the arrest, President Ricardo Lagos was in Iquique, and the families confronted him there, Cooperativa reported. Inter Press Service reported that Lagos called the case "very sad" but defended the recent abolition of the death penalty, which had been replaced that year with effective life imprisonment, even as residents demonstrated for the execution of Perez Silva. Cooperativa reported that Lagos apologized to the families in Iquique, and Inter Press Service reported that Claudio Huepe, a minister in his government, apologized for police attempts to discredit the victims.
So in Chile the law changed first and the case followed. The change was fresh enough that a president was defending it in front of a crowd while the suspect was only days into his confession. What mattered was what replaced it. Judge Ayala sentenced Perez Silva to simple life imprisonment, which allowed a prisoner to apply for conditional release after twenty years. Cecilia Latorre, for the State Defense Council, said the chance that a parole commission would approve release for a man convicted of such crimes was practically nil, and that he would in practice spend the rest of his life in prison. The families heard it differently. The day after the judgment, about forty relatives and neighbors protested outside the Iquique Court of Appeals and blocked part of the route between Iquique and Alto Hospicio, Cooperativa reported. Neighbors said they feared he could be released in twenty-five years. Senator Jaime Orpis of the Tarapaca region said many people felt justice had not been done, since with the death penalty abolished they had expected the forty-year qualified life sentence, and he predicted the appeals court would change the ruling. A former justice minister, Jose Antonio Gomez, said he was surprised that qualified life imprisonment had not been imposed given the number of killings.
They were right about the appeals court. In September 2005 the Iquique Court of Appeals raised the main sentence to qualified life imprisonment, under which he must serve at least forty years before he can apply for any prison benefit. The Supreme Court ratified it, Cooperativa reported on October 16, 2006. A lawyer for the families, Alejandro Espinoza, said the case had forced the authorities and the public to change how they saw it. Ramon Suarez of the Fundacion Amparo y Justicia said the families were satisfied because the sentence matched the gravity of the crimes.
Here abolition did not decide the sentence. It decided what the argument was about. Without a death penalty available, the whole argument moved to the length of the minimum term, and the families and a senator argued over a number of years with the same intensity others elsewhere argued over the scaffold. By October 2021 Perez Silva was held at the high-security prison Colina I, Meganoticias reported, and El Dinamo reported in March 2026 that he was serving qualified life imprisonment there. In January 2026 the Justice Minister, Jaime Gajardo, warned that a Senate bill allowing older or seriously ill prisoners to serve their sentences in the community could benefit him, T13 and El Dinamo reported, and El Dinamo said the Senate approved the bill in general in March 2026. Whether he would qualify under the final text had not been settled by March 2026. In March 2026, by a decree published in the Diario Oficial on March 24, a memorial in Iquique to the fourteen victims was declared a national monument.
Denmark abolished the death penalty after this case, not during it. Dagmar Overbye was dead before the abolition, and her death sentence had already been set aside by royal pardon. The case matters for what it shows about the country’s reluctance, and for the order of events that Danish sources themselves draw.
In 1921 a jury at Østre Landsret in Copenhagen convicted Overbye of killing infants who had been handed to her by their mothers. She was a working woman of about thirty with a record of thefts, who answered and placed newspaper advertisements offering to take babies. The mothers, most of them unmarried and poor, paid a single sum and left believing their children would go to a good family. The number of counts is disputed. Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon and Den Store Danske say she was convicted on nine counts, eight foster children and one of her own children. TV 2 Kosmopol, drawing on the Police Museum, Videnskab.dk and Den Store Danske’s entry on serial killing say eight infants, between 1916 and 1920. The difference seems to turn on the ninth child. Videnskab.dk summed up the trial this way: the defense argued that she was the victim of an uncaring society, and the prosecutor still got the death sentence he asked for.
She did not appeal. About a month later she was pardoned, after a recommendation from a meeting of the Council of State, on condition that she was never released and never given any relaxation of the prison rules. The Copenhagen Post reported that King Christian X commuted her sentence to life imprisonment, reasoning that a modern and enlightened Denmark should not execute women. Sources disagree about 1861. The Copenhagen Post called Overbye the first woman in Denmark to be sentenced to death since that year. The Danish encyclopedias say that 1861 was the year the last woman was executed, and Den Store Danske says the last execution of any kind in Denmark took place in 1892.
She served her sentence first at the women’s prison at Christianshavn and later at Vestre Fængsel, the large prison in the south of Copenhagen, where she died on May 6, 1929. TV 2 Kosmopol, Information and Avisen.dk all give her age at death as 42; the Copenhagen Post gave 43. The following year Denmark’s new penal code of 1930 abolished the death penalty. Information noted that by then the country had gone almost seventy years without executing anyone, and that Overbye’s death sentence had been commuted about ten years earlier. Den Store Danske adds that the penalty came back for a time after the German occupation and that two women were sentenced to death in that period; both were pardoned.
What changed in Denmark because of the case, in the encyclopedia’s account, was the law on children, not the law on punishment. The public argument it set off, about what Denmark owed women who had children outside marriage and the children themselves, led directly to the Act on the Supervision of Foster Children of 1923, according to the Danish reference works. Danish reference works call the trial one of the most discussed in Danish history.
The Overbye case is therefore the one where the order is reversed. The state did not abolish the sentence in the middle of her case. It declined to carry it out in 1921, kept her in prison until she died in 1929, and abolished the penalty a year after that. The pardon, with its condition that she never be released, did the work that abolition would do elsewhere.
Kaspars Petrovs was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Riga Regional Court on May 12, 2005. The court convicted him of 13 murders, together with attempted murders, theft and robbery. Almost all of the people he killed were elderly women living in Riga, and he killed them in the course of robberies between 2000 and early 2003. He was arrested in Riga on February 3, 2003, first on a theft matter, and confessed to many more killings than the court would accept. The Baltic Times called him the most prolific serial killer in Latvian history, and Latvian papers called him a "21st-century Kaupens" and likened him to Andrei Chikatilo.
The indictment put before the court in February 2005 listed 38 murders and eight attempted murders among 53 criminal episodes. The case had reached the court as six separate files, joined into one. Prosecutors told the court that every one of the killings was committed for the sake of robbery. The Baltic Times reported at the sentencing that a lack of forensic evidence limited the murder convictions to 13. Neatkariga wrote in 2007 that the court recognized fewer than half of the killings he had confessed to because of errors by police and medical examiners, and that 23 deaths were left with no one held responsible for them and no one looking. The paper’s first report on the day of the verdict had described the conviction as covering all 38, which its follow-up on May 18 and the Latvian press corrected to 13. "I wanted only to rob them, not to kill them," he told the court, according to The Baltic Times.
Latvia is the case in which abolition lay entirely outside the sentence. The law provided life imprisonment or ten to twenty years; there was nothing above it to lose. The death penalty entered the story only afterward, in a retrospective. Neatkariga Rita Avize noted in 2015 that Latvia had carried out its last executions in January 1996 and had ratified Protocol No. 13 in January 2012, and that the Petrovs case had prompted some emotional calls to bring capital punishment back. By the time of the verdict, in other words, Latvia had gone nine years without an execution. By the time Latvia ratified the protocol that bars the penalty in all circumstances, Petrovs had been in prison for nearly seven years. No official response to those calls was reported.
The rules on release from a life sentence have been reported differently over the years, and that is where the abolition left its mark. In 2007 the Prison Administration told Neatkariga that, like every life prisoner, he could apply for early release after 21 years, and that he could ask the president for clemency after 16 years. The head of the Presidential Pardon Service told the paper that the first clemency request from a life prisoner might come in 2013. Jauns.lv, citing the Criminal Law, wrote in 2026 that a life prisoner may apply for conditional release after 25 years, and that Petrovs could in theory apply from 2028. His lawyer told RUS TVNET in 2017 that Petrovs behaved well in prison. Petrovs began his sentence at Riga Central Prison and was later held in Jelgava, and by 2007 he was at the Daugavpils prison known as "Baltais gulbis," the White Swan. Jauns.lv, in February 2026, described him as held at the Daugavgrīva prison of the same name.
Taiwan has not abolished the death penalty. What its Constitutional Court did, and did not do, is narrower than abolition.
Lin Yu-ju killed three members of her own family in about eight months. Her mother died in Tainan in November 2008, her mother-in-law in Puli, Nantou County, in May 2009, and her husband in the same town in July 2009. Each of them had been insured shortly before, and the money was meant for gambling debts that Taiwanese reports put at more than NT$20 million, run up mostly on an illegal lottery. She was 27 at the time of the killings, according to the Public Television Service (PTS) and SETN.
Prosecutors asked for the death penalty on all three murder counts, TVBS reported on April 8, 2010. The district court sentenced her to death for the killing of her husband, PTS reported. On appeal, the Taichung branch of the High Court reduced it to life imprisonment, citing her previous good conduct and remorse. The Supreme Court then made the two life sentences for the killings of her mother and mother-in-law final, PTS reported on June 8, 2012. On the husband’s count it concluded that the High Court had not fully established the facts and sent the case back. On September 13, 2012, the Taichung High Court, on retrial, sentenced her to death. The presiding judge said she had acted for her own need for money and had disregarded the bond between husband and wife, and that such conduct was unforgivable.
Her lawyers appealed again, arguing that her IQ of 57 and her depression ruled out a death sentence. The Supreme Court held an oral hearing in May 2013 and dismissed her appeal on June 13, 2013, making the death sentence final, with lifetime deprivation of civil rights. The presiding judge said her intelligence was not markedly lower than normal, PTS reported. She was 32. She was the first woman sentenced to death in Taiwan in 23 years, and the ruling raised the number of prisoners awaiting execution to 51. Her husband’s sister told PTS that the ruling gave society an answer and that the family felt comforted. Agence France-Presse, in a report printed by Ahram Online and The Peninsula of Qatar, quoted the court as calling her conduct "cruel and merciless."
The Taipei Times, in a 2022 feature, gave a wider picture. It reported that Lin, her husband and members of his family all bet tens of thousands of New Taiwan dollars at a time on the lottery, and that she said her husband beat her after their child was born. A family doctor’s statements about her injuries were not admitted at trial because there were no police records of the beatings, the paper reported. Medical reports diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and a mild intellectual disability.
Her case then became one of a larger one. In 2024 all 37 people then on Taiwan’s death row, Lin among them, asked the Constitutional Court to rule on the death penalty. The court heard arguments on April 23, 2024, and delivered Judgment 113-Hsien-Pan-8 on September 20, 2024. It held that the death penalty is constitutional but may be imposed only for the most serious crimes, those involving direct intent to kill, and only under the strictest procedures, including mandatory defense counsel, oral argument at the Supreme Court and a unanimous decision by the judges, The Reporter reported. It also ruled that a death sentence may not be imposed on a defendant with a mental disorder or other mental or intellectual defect. The Reporter named three of the petitioners who met that condition, Shen Chi-wu, Lin Wang-jen and Lin Yu-ju, and said the judgment held that their executions may not proceed until the law is amended. Storm Media reported that the court noted that her final judgment had recognized mental disorder of varying degrees. The court gave the legislature two years to amend the related laws, according to an analysis by the Taiwanese lawyer Szu-Yu Chen in Taiwan Insight.
That is why Taiwan is a near-abolition and not an abolition. The sentence did not lapse. The ruling bars one execution, and others like it, and leaves the penalty in place for everyone else. SETN reported in January 2025 that Huang Lin-kai had been executed and that 36 remained on death row, and TVBS reported on September 15, 2026 that the number had fallen to 34. Lin, still the only woman among them, was one of the 34. Her execution, in the court’s language, may not proceed until the law is amended, and the two-year period the legislature was given ran to September 2026. What the legislature did with it has not been reported.
Set side by side, the cases do not make a single story. In Ukraine the penalty ended after the verdict and the confirming appeal, within a year. In Russia it ended in practice, by a moratorium, twice between sentences and once before one. In Chile it had ended already, and the argument moved to the length of the minimum term. In Turkey it ended in law in 2002, while a release law passed two years earlier did the practical work. In Denmark the pardon came first and the abolition nine years after it. In Latvia it hardly figures. In Taiwan it did not end; a court barred one woman’s execution, among others, and left the penalty standing for the rest.
The families appear in all of them. In Ukraine they shouted in a courtroom; in Russia mothers asked the Supreme Court for a sentence the moratorium had foreclosed and then campaigned for its return; in Chile they blocked a route and a senator spoke for them. None of them was asked whether the state should abolish anything. What each state asked of them, in the end, was to accept that a sentence of death written on paper in March or in December was not a promise that anything would be carried out.
• 1861: Danish encyclopedias date the last execution of a woman in Denmark to this year; the Copenhagen Post gives it as the last death sentence on a woman.
• 1892: According to Den Store Danske, the last execution of any kind in Denmark.
• 1921: A jury at Østre Landsret convicts Dagmar Overbye and she is sentenced to death; about a month later she is pardoned.
• 1923: Denmark passes the Act on the Supervision of Foster Children.
• May 6, 1929: Overbye dies in Vestre Fængsel.
• 1930: Denmark’s new penal code abolishes the death penalty.
• 1984: Turkey’s last judicial execution, according to Human Rights Watch.
• July 1995: Maslich sentenced to death for the Rubtsovsk killing.
• November 1995: Ukraine joins the Council of Europe and promises to abolish the death penalty.
• January 1996: Latvia’s last executions, according to Neatkariga Rita Avize.
• April 1996: Onoprienko arrested in Yavoriv.
• December 1996: Maslich sentenced to death a second time.
• March 1997: A halt to executions in practice begins in Ukraine; Altapress dates the Russian moratorium to 1997.
• November 1998: The Council of Europe’s deadline for Ukraine passes; Onoprienko’s trial opens on November 23.
• March 31 and April 1, 1999: Onoprienko sentenced to death; the verdict is read over twelve hours.
• August 1999: The Supreme Court of Ukraine upholds Onoprienko’s sentence.
• December 29, 1999: The Constitutional Court of Ukraine rules the death penalty unconstitutional.
• April 4, 2000: Life imprisonment comes into force in Ukraine.
• December 21, 2000: Turkey adopts Law No. 4616.
• October 4, 2001: Perez Silva arrested in Chile, the year the country abolished the death penalty; the next day President Lagos defends the abolition in Iquique.
• August 2, 2002: Turkey abolishes the death penalty for peacetime offenses.
• February 3, 2003: Petrovs arrested in Riga.
• February 26, 2004: Perez Silva sentenced to simple life imprisonment.
• May 12, 2005: Petrovs sentenced to life imprisonment in Riga.
• May 28, 2005: Adnan Colak released in Turkey, according to Turkish press reports.
• September 2005: The Iquique Court of Appeals raises Perez Silva’s sentence to qualified life imprisonment; the Supreme Court ratifies it in October 2006.
• March 20, 2008: Voronenko sentenced to life imprisonment in St. Petersburg.
• January 2012: Latvia ratifies Protocol No. 13.
• June 13, 2013: Lin Yu-ju’s death sentence becomes final in Taiwan.
• August 27, 2013: Onoprienko dies in Zhytomyr prison.
• March 27, 2024: Voronenko charged with a further murder.
• September 20, 2024: Taiwan’s Constitutional Court delivers Judgment 113-Hsien-Pan-8.
• September 15, 2026: Taiwan’s death row reported at 34.