The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area Divide. The event gathered experts and speakers from Belarus and other countries, international organizations (EU Special Representative for Human Rights, Council of Europe and UN Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights) the diplomatic community (United Kingdom and Switzerland), civil society and churches. Since February 2010, the Belarusian Parliament has maintained a working group to study the issue of the death penalty in Belarus. According to the country’s submission to the second cycle Universal Periodic Review, the members of the working group hold meetings and take part in socio-political events related to the death penalty on a regular basis. During this report’s reporting period, the Working Group held two meetings to discuss the situation of the use of death penalty in Belarus. During the meetings, crimes for which persons were sentenced to capital punishment or life imprisonment were analyzed. The head of the working group also took part in hearings on the situation in Belarus at the Political Affairs and Democracy session of the PACE meeting on 28 January, 2016 in Strasbourg, where the application of the death penalty was discussed. United States of America As of 31 March 2016, 18 states in the United States have abolished capital punishment and 12 additional states had not carried out executions in the 10 years prior. That more than half of the states do not carry out executions underlines the ongoing trend towards abolition of the death penalty in the United States.166 The states of California, Delaware, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, South Dakota and Utah all developed initiatives or proposed bills to abolish the death penalty during the reporting period. At this point, four of these legislative proposals have yet to be reviewed by legislative bodies. In Kentucky, South Dakota and Utah, the bills aimed at abolishing the death penalty did not gather enough votes and were eventually defeated in either the states’ houses of representatives or state senates. Other legislative developments include New Hampshire Bill SB 463, introduced on 6 January 2016, which intends to suspend the death penalty until such time that methods exist to ensure that it cannot be imposed on innocent people.167 This bill was eventually defeated by the New Hampshire State Senate’s vote on 3 March 2016. In Ohio, a new bill, which intends to exempt defendants with severe mental illness from the death penalty, was referred to the Ohio State Senate Criminal Justice Committee, and hearings were conducted on 27 January and 10 February 2016. In Mississippi, a bill to expand the death penalty to include those who murder certain public servants, such as first responders, was initially passed by the State House of Representatives on March 2016, but did not become a law after being assigned to its judiciary committee. Mississippi’s Senate Bill 2237, providing for execution in secrecy, was amended by the House of Representatives in March 2016 to include the option 166  Amnesty International, op. cit., note 24, p. 14. 167  New Hampshire Senate Bill, SB 463-FN, 16-2820, (2016), <https://legiscan.com/NH/text/SB463/ id/1287234>. 42