Gender, globalisation and the gallows: women sentenced to death for drug trafficking in Malaysia

I am applying to study for a DPhil at the University of Oxford's Centre for Criminology due to my proposed supervisor - Professor Carolyn Hoyle's - world-leading expertise on the death penalty. Professor Hoyle has written about gender and the death penalty in publications, including within editions of the seminal work, The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective (Hood & Hoyle, 2008, 2015), as well as a piece entitled 'Remembering Women Sentenced to Death' (Hoyle, 2015). This particular research proposal complements Professor Hoyle's current research into foreign nationals on death row, as I would investigate the evidence that female foreign nationals are being held on death row on drug smuggling charges in Indonesia and Malaysia and that their gender and other socio-demographic variables may make them particularly vulnerable to exploitation by drug traffickers. Malaysia is currently undergoing some changes to the imposition of the mandatory death penalty for drug offences, introducing discretion for some drug offences, making possible a comparative analysis of these two jurisdictions. Furthermore, I would be able to utilise the academic and professional connections that Professor Hoyle has with death penalty lawyers and human rights organisations in these Asian jurisdictions to aid and facilitate my empirical research. I would draw upon my previous academic and professional experience of the death penalty. My academic interest in capital punishment was ignited whilst studying abroad as part of my undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), when I took a class entitled 'Race, Innocence and the Decline of the US Death Penalty' under the direction of a leader in the field, Professor Frank Baumgartner. This class covered all manner of topics related to the US death penalty, including: race and injustice; the geography of the death penalty; innocence; capital crimes, trials and appeals; particular Supreme Court decisions such as Furman and Gregg; the North Carolina Racial Justice Act 2009; and public opinion. I wrote papers on the topics of botched executions and wrongful convictions for which I achieved a GPA of 4.0 (and across all subject matters I studied at UNC). I attended talks given by those intimately involved in the US death penalty, including Anthony Ray Hinton, a recent exoneree from Alabama's death row. I visited Central Prison at Raleigh, and witnessed the solitary confinement cells, mental health units, and death row. Following my semester abroad I interned at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL) in Durham, NC, whereby I assisted in the following capacities: I met with a client on death row; I reviewed and gathered evidence in two capital murder appeals; and I assembled exhibits from hearings from the repeal of the North Carolina Racial Justice Act 2009.