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The government has sentenced an increasing number of convicts to death because it lacks the money to expand overcrowded prisons, a prominent human-rights activist said Friday.
“A bullet is cheaper than new prisons,” Lev Razgon, member of a presidential commission that reviews pleas to commute sentences, wrote in the influential daily Izvestia.
In 1991, President Boris Yeltsin created the commission in a bid to reverse the Soviet-era tradition of broad use of capital punishment.
On the commission’s advice, Yeltsin began commuting most death sentences to life imprisonment. But last year, the trend suddenly reversed, Razgon said.
