Former Stalingrad) Oblast
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CURRENT SURVEY the Volgograd (former Stalingrad) oblast. In this oblast the number of unsupervised and neglected children has not decreased since 1959. Defi- ciencies are noted in providing employment for 15- and 16-year old adolescents. The Volgograd Executive Committees and Soviets are ordered to work out and to implement measures necessary to prevent the neglect of children and adolescents. The last two sections of the journal deal with reports of cases before the Supreme Courts of the USSR or the Union Republics or the State Arbitration Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/3/2/186/335724 by guest on 25 September 2021 —a department attached to the Council of Ministers of the USSR dealing with legal disputes between state enterprises. EXECUTIONS IN THE UNITED STATES 1961 • TERENCE MORRIS NATIONAL Prisoner Statistics just issued by the United States Department of Justice show that in 1961 the figure for civil executions was the lowest on record since 1930 when statistics were first collected by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. In 1961 twenty whites and twenty-two negroes were executed compared with the 1930 figure of ninety whites and sixty-five negroes. The peak figure of the period was in 1935 when 199 persons, of whom seventy- seven were negroes, suffered the capital penalty. In all states which have retained the death penalty since 1930 the average annual figure of executions has fallen since 1954—in the north-eastern states from twenty-five a year to two, and in the southern states where death is the penalty for rape, from an average of twenty-four a year to eleven. 898 per cent, of men executed for rape in 1961 were negroes. California, which has the reputation of the most advanced penal system in the US., paradoxically headed the execution league in 1961 with eight executions by lethal gas, followed by South Carolina and Mississippi with five each, Virginia with four and Georgia and Texas with three each. These six states accounted for two-thirds of the national total. Although the average time between sentence and actual execution was sixteen months, one murderer in Mississippi had been waiting six years, five months and thirteen days for his seat in the electric chair. No woman has suffered the death penalty in the United States since 1957. Since 1930 the Army and the Air Force have carried out 160 death sentences, twenty-one of them since 1950. Of these 160 executions, 106 were for murder (including twenty-one involving rape), fifty-three for rape alone, and one, that of Private Eddie Slovik, for desertion. The United States Navy carried out its last execution in 1849. • U.S. Department of Justice. Bureau of Prisons. National Prisoner Statistics No. 28. April 1962. Executions 196/. 186.