President Emmerson Mnangagwa on 27 March 2020 directed the freeing of 5,000 prisoners with immediate effect as he declared a 21-day coronavirus national lockdown.

A criminal court on 26 March 2020 sentenced five people to death, over damaging a petroleum pipeline and causing the death of nine people in November in northern Egypt.

Botswana on 28 March 2020 executed two men convicted of murder.

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom unanimously ruled that the British government unlawfully provided information to the United States about two suspected Islamic State members without first obtaining assurances that the information would not be used to impose or carry out the death penalty.

Sri Lanka's president on 26 March 2020 pardoned and released an army officer sentenced to death for slitting the throats of Tamil civilians, including four children, during the island's bloody ethnic war.

Yemen's Houthi rebels announced they had pardoned a minority Baha’i sentenced to death over his religion and ordered the release of more than 20 other members of the minority imprisoned in the capital Sanaa, local reports said on 25 March 2020.

Forty political prisoners in the Greater Tehran Penitentiary have started a hunger strike since 16 March 2020 to protest Judiciary officials’ rejection of granting leaves to political prisoners and prisoners of conscience after the spread of Coronavirus to prisons, Iran-HRM reported on 22 March.

A former senior Aum Shinrikyo member wrote a letter in English urging would-be terrorists not to carry out their planned attacks before he was executed in 2018 for his involvement in the cult's 1995 sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system.

The United Nations on 21 March 2020 called on all nations to stop the use of capital punishment or put a moratorium on it, a day after four men convicted of gang-raping and murdering a 23-year-old woman were hanged in India.

The Ras Al Khaimah Criminal Court of Appeal has upheld the death sentence earlier issued against an Asian father after he was found guilty of sexually abusing his minor daughter, Khaleej Times reported on 25 March 2020.

An Ekiti State High Court sitting in Ado Ekiti has sentenced six persons to death for murder and attempted murder, Daily Post reported on 24 March 2020.

A man has been sentenced to death in the central Hunan province for kidnapping and raping a 16-year-old girl whom he held captive in a hidden room under the floor of his home for over three weeks, domestic outlet Red Star News reported on 23 March 2020.