Death penalty moratorium in Mongolia

Mongolian President Tsakhia Elbegdorj announced a moratorium on the death penalty on 14 Jan 2010, and called for it to be abolished. He told parliament that the death penalty degraded Mongolia's dignity.

"International Death Penalty Abolition Day" is March 1st, marking "the occasion in 1847 when the state of Michigan became the first English-speaking territory in the world to abolish capital punishment." (I love to brag about that, even though most of my forefathers settled in Michigan later, and the gravitational pull of the U.S. invasion of Vietnam caused me to be born in a Naval hospital in California instead of Mich.)