Authorities in North Korea executed without trial three high-ranking officials last week on charges of treason, for allegedly stealing food from the country’s strategic supply and selling it on the open market amid skyrocketing prices resulting from the ongoing coronavirus epidemic, sources within the isolated country told Radio Free Asia on 5 April 2020.

“The Death Penalty Project” on 7 April 2020 published its latest report: “Sentenced to Death Without Execution: Why capital punishment has not yet been abolished in the Eastern Caribbean and Barbados” by Professor Roger Hood and Dr Florence Seemungal with the assistance of attorney-at-law Amaya Athill.

Tunisian President Kais Saied on 31 March 2020 granted a special pardon to 1,420 inmates in order to reduce the country's prison population amid the spread of the coronavirus, official news agency TAP reported.

King Mohammed VI ordered on 5 April 2020 the release of 5,654 detainees in an exceptional royal pardon due to the COVID-19 crisis.

The Taiwan High Court on 7 April 2020 overturned the death penalty for a man convicted of raping, killing and dismembering a woman in the Huashan Grassland in Taipei in 2018, and instead sentenced him to life in prison.

Death row juvenile offender Danial Zeinolabedini was beaten to death by prison guards.

A former soldier was on 4 April 2020 sentenced to death by a navy court in Mogadishu for the homicide of a civilian.

An Osun State High Court sitting in Ikirun on 2nd April 2020 sentenced two men Elijah Oyebode and Jelili Raji to death by hanging for the murder of a female student of University of Osun.

Singapore's Court of Appeal on 31 March 2020 acquitted a convicted drug trafficker on death row of two capital drug charges and sentenced him to eight years' jail instead for drug possession.

At least eight prisoners, who have been on the death row for periods ranging from 10 to 12 years, this week had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment in line with the recent Presidential clemency order, ZimEye reported on 4 April 2020.

The association "Hands off Cain-Spes contra spem", faced with the news of the first death of a prisoner linked to the coronavirus, which follows the equally tragic news of two prison officers who died in recent days, "asks the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic to pay close attention to the risk of a pandemic extended to prisons, which would have disastrous effects not only for prisoners and prison workers but also for the external community."

The 12th annual report on the death penalty by Iran Human Rights (IHR) and ECPM (Ensemble Contre la Peine de Mort/Together Against the Death Penalty), published on 31 March 2020, provides an assessment and analysis of the death penalty trends in 2019 in the Islamic Republic of Iran.