The Political Use of Capital Punishment in Communist Romania between 1969 and 1989

There are two major studies that approach the death penalty in East European countries during the communist period. The first one is a chapter by Stanislaw Frankowski in a book entitled Capital Punishment: Global Issues and Prospects. ¹ It is a comprehensive survey of the evolution of capital punishment in all the East European countries, and relates it to the political context. The second study is the article ‘The Abolition of the Death Penalty in Central and Eastern Europe’, by Agata Fijalkowski. ² Although focused on post-communist abolitionism, like most of the approaches provided by legal scholars, it also gives an extensive summary of capital punishment during the communist period in Central-Eastern European countries. It emphasizes that during the Stalinist period, the death penalty was used to intimidate the population, becoming a political issue rather than a legal one. The study confronts one of the major problems of the research field – the lack of data – relying mainly upon the data that Frankowski provides in his research.