The Guatemalan penal code (1973) provides for the death penalty for parricide, aggravated homicide and assassination of the President or Vice-President.

The Guatemalan penal code (1973) provides for the death penalty for parricide, aggravated homicide and assassination of the President or Vice-President.
Kidnapping and extra-judicial executions became capital offences in 1996, but Guatemala could not apply the maximum penalty since, in 1978, the country had ratified the American Convention on Human Rights, essentially pledging not to extend the death penalty to other crimes after the ratification. The Constitutional Court declared the law void.
Under the 1986 Constitution the death penalty cannot be imposed on women, people over 60, those guilty of political crimes or related common crimes, or people extradited on condition that the death penalty will not be applied.
Pardons to convicted criminals are no longer handled by the presidency, but by the Supreme Court.
The country, which has emerged from a 36-year civil war, has seen its crime rate escalate, and dozens of suspected criminals have been lynched in rural areas.
After a 13-year lull in executions, two men were shot by a firing squad in 1996. This execution was botched and prison guards were forced to finish off the men with pistol shots to the head, a gruesome scene replayed hundreds of times on local television. The Guatemalan Congress then adopted lethal injection, which was applied for the first time on February 10, 1998 on Manuel Martínez.
The last execution in Guatemala took place in 2000. Two people, businessman Luis Amilcar Cetin and farmer Tomas Cerrate, were put to death on June 29, 2000 for the kidnapping and murder of businesswoman Isabel de Botran, whose family owned the country's largest alcoholic beverage producer.
There were 37 death row inmates in Guatemala in August 2004.
Guatemala is one of the last two Latin America countries to retain the death penalty.
On July 27, 2002 Guatemala's then President Alfonso Portillo introduced a moratorium on executions for the duration of his mandate up to 2004. The move was made in response to a request by Pope John Paul II and was announced just prior to his visit to the country. Portillo also proposed abolitionist legislation to the country's National Assembly, but nothing came of this.
Current President Oscar Berger has said he personally objects to the death penalty.  In early 2004, the country's human rights commissioner, Frank LaRue, said a legal team that works with the president was studying whether to ask Congress to abolish the punishment. In 2003, the Supreme Court, which can also propose legislation in Guatemala, sent a proposal to Congress to abolish capital punishment, but the bill was yet to be included on the legislative agenda in late 2004. Human  rights groups were increasing the pressure on the government to abolish capital punishment.