Bangladesh Politically Salient Death Penalty Dataset (BPSDP)
Description
The Bangladesh Politically Salient Death Penalty Dataset (BPSDP) v0.2-expanded is a defendant-level dataset of capital sentences imposed in politically salient criminal and tribunal proceedings in Bangladesh, from the post-1975 regime transition to a cutoff of 30 June 2024. It contains 222 observations across nine case clusters, including the BDR/Pilkhana mutiny murder case (152 rows), International Crimes Tribunal proceedings for 1971 offences, the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the 1975 Jail Killing case, the 21 August 2004 grenade attack, the Holey Artisan Bakery attack, and related national-security prosecutions. Offence years span 1971–2016 and sentencing years 1976–2023; 16 defendants were executed before the cutoff. Each row records one defendant or death-sentence observation across 32 fields covering case category, court or tribunal, sentencing stage, legal and higher-court status as of the cutoff, execution and in-absentia status, source URL, and a coder confidence flag. A composite political salience score (0–8) is built from five transparent indicators: media attention (0–3), official rhetoric (0–1), opposition/regime conflict (0–1), public mobilisation (0–2), and international human-rights attention (0–1). Coding relies on accessible secondary sources, principally national news reporting and human-rights organisation statements, rather than certified judgment texts. Because published sources give reliable aggregate counts for the BDR/Pilkhana case but no clean list of 152 names, those rows appear as clearly flagged anonymous cluster observations with group-level High Court outcomes; they support aggregate and comparative analysis but must not be cited as named individual defendants. The workbook includes a summary sheet, full codebook, source guide, and a method note documenting these limitations and the verification steps planned for future versions.