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In a landmark ruling, a North Carolina judge vacated the death penalty Friday of a convicted murderer, saying prosecutors across the state had engaged for years in a deliberate and systematic pattern of racial discrimination while striking black potential jurors in death penalty cases. In a 167-page order harshly critical of prosecutors, Superior Court Judge Gregory Weeks said they "intentionally used the race of (jury pool) members as a significant factor in decisions to exercise peremptory strikes in capital cases." He ruled that discrimination was a factor not only in the case Weeks heard involving convicted murderer Marcus Reymond Robinson,...

Serial killer David Alan Gore is set to be executed sooner than he expected, in part because he could not stop bragging about raping and murdering four teenagers and two women in the Vero Beach area about 30 years ago. Several people have made sure the boasting did not go unnoticed. There was the Las Vegas man who wrote to Gore, an author who published the inmate's grotesque letters, and a newspaper columnist and editorial board who brought the case to the attention of Florida Gov. Rick Scott. The Republican promptly signed the death warrant even though more than 40...

A bill repealing the death penalty cleared the Judiciary Committee on a 24-19 vote Wednesday night and was headed to the Senate, where a proponent, Sen. Eric D. Coleman, D-Bloomfield, said he was "very optimistic" about winning passage. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy is committed to signing a repeal bill similar to one vetoed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell in 2009 after it squeaked through the Senate on a 19-17 vote. With eight new senators, a vote in the Senate again is projected to be close. The governor discounted the impact of a new Quinnipiac University poll that found Connecticut voters...

Iran executed some 670 people last year, most of them for drug crimes that do not merit capital punishment under international law and more than 20 for offenses against Islam, a United Nations investigator said on Monday. The investigator, former Maldives foreign minister Ahmed Shaheed, also reported what he said were a wide range of violations by Iran of U.N. human rights accords, from abuse of minorities to persecution of homosexuals and labor unions. Shaheed was delivering his first report to the U.N.'s 47-nation Human Rights Council on the rights situation in the country since being appointed last year. It...

On Wednesday night, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice will execute George Rivas, 41, for murdering Irving police Officer Aubrey Hawkins on December 24, 2000. "I'm glad justice is being served and he's going to the death chamber," Lori Hawkins-Acosta, the officer's widow, told News 8. "I just want to see justice served." Rivas was the ringleader of the so-called Texas 7. Eleven years ago, he led a daring escape from the TDCJ's Connally Unit near San Antonio. The seven inmates fled first to Houston and later to North Texas, where they robbed an Oshman's sporting goods store in...

DALLAS, Ga. — A Paulding County judge has scheduled an execution for a man convicted of the 2001 killing a woman and her 3-year-old daughter. The judge ruled Thursday that Nicholas Cody Tate will be put to death between Jan. 31 and Feb. 7. State officials have not yet determined the date of the execution. A spokeswoman for the Georgia Attorney General's office declined comment. Tate's case moved relatively quickly through the death penalty appeals process because he has yet to challenge his death sentence by filing a habeas appeal. Tate pleaded guilty in 2005 to murdering 26-year-old Chrissie Williams...

Donald Neilson has just died at the age of 75. He had been looked after by the State for the past 36 years, receiving three square meals a day which he didn’t pay for and he was provided with a warm and secure shelter. Contrast Neilson’s life to that of Lesley Whittle. At the age of just 17, it was snuffed out. She died alone and naked, with her neck tethered by a wire noose, down a 60ft reservoir drainage shaft. Such an ordeal would have been terrifying for anyone, let alone a teenage girl. Neilson was better known as...

The European Commission has imposed tough new restrictions on the export of anaesthetics used to execute people in the US, in a move that will exacerbate the already extreme shortage of the drugs in many of the 34 states that still practice the death penalty. The EC has added eight barbiturates to its list of restricted products that are tightly controlled on the grounds that they may be used for "capital punishment, torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment". The eight include pentobarbital and sodium thiopental – the two drugs on which almost all American executions currently...

BOISE - Triple murderer Paul Ezra Rhoades was executed this morning despite repeated last-minute appeals, in Idaho’s first execution since 1994 and only its second since 1957. “The time of death is 9:15,” Mountain time, Idaho Department of Corrections spokesman Jeff Ray announced. “The procedures are complete.” In his final words, Rhoades took responsibility for one of the murders, but not the other two. A friend of the family of one of the victims, who was in the chamber witnessing the execution, said, “The devil has gone home.” Unlike the last person executed in Idaho, double murderer Keith Eugene Wells,...

I hate the death penalty and always have, so I do not say this lightly, but it’s high time even opponents of capital punishment start thinking seriously about executing convicted terrorists. Unlike even the worst criminals such as serial killers, terrorists remain dangerous to societies at large even after they’ve been locked up with life sentences because innocents outside the prison walls are frequently kidnapped to secure their release. The Israeli government just struck a deal with Hamas to free Gilad Shalit, a soldier who was kidnapped five years ago near the border with Gaza. In exchange for Shalit’s release,...

  “You’ll Swing for This!” Thoughts on the Execution of Troy Davis David C. Stolinsky Sept. 26, 2011 On Sept. 21, Georgia executed convicted murderer Troy Davis by lethal injection. Twenty-two years ago, Davis murdered police officer Mark MacPhail. After shooting Officer MacPhail, Davis stood over him and shot him again. Predictably, MacPhail’s name was mentioned much less often than the murderer’s name, and there were demonstrations for the murderer but none for MacPhail. For details read Ann Coulter, who is an attorney and − unlike other commentators − actually reviewed the transcript. If opponents of capital punishment claim...

'It's Over': After Three Torturous Hours Strapped To The Chair Troy Davis Has Been Executed Davis finally died at 11.08pm All nine Supreme Court justices voted to deny the stay after taking more than four hours to come to their decision Appeal had challenged ballistics linking Davis to the crime, and eyewitness testimony identifying Davis as the killer Davis convicted of killing off duty police officer Mark MacPhail in 1989 Defence lawyers say there is still 'lingering doubt' of Davis' guilt By HANNAH ROBERTS 22nd September 2011 Mental torture: The convicted murderer was sedated and strapped to the chair in...

(CBS/AP)  JACKSON, Ga. - Georgia executed Troy Davis on Wednesday night for the murder of an off-duty police officer, a crime he denied committing right to the end as supporters around the world mourned and declared that an innocent man was put to death. Defiant to the end, he told relatives of Mark MacPhail that his 1989 slaying was not his fault. "I did not have a gun," he insisted.

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — White supremacist gang member Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed Wednesday evening for the infamous dragging death slaying of James Byrd Jr., a black man from East Texas. Byrd, 49, was chained to the back of a pickup truck and pulled whip-like to his death along a bumpy asphalt road in one of the most grisly hate crime murders in recent Texas history. Brewer, 44, was asked if he had any final words, to which he replied: "No. I have no final statement." He glanced at his parents watching through a nearby window, took several deep breaths and...

Beneath the guard towers and behind the razor wire of a Texas prison, Lawrence Brewer lifts his arm to display his racist tattoos. “Like a cross burning and an intertwined KKK,” he explains, showing off the images cut into his flesh that turned his body into a billboard for hate. His worldview of racial relations came from an earlier stint in prison. “Watching the blacks and the Mexicans and other races literally beat people near death. So I came out after four years of that, with that mentality,” he said. What he did after he came out of prison made...

I said here last night that the California GOP audience cheering the announcement that Texas has executed 234 condemned murderers under Rick Perry was a vile, repulsive thing. Even when I was for capital punishment, I believed this. Justice may require execution, but we should never rejoice in taking the life of another human being. At best, capital punishment is a necessary evil. I quit believing in capital punishment when I became convinced that the state is not trustworthy to use this power responsibly. It happened about 10 years ago, when it emerged that a forensic scientist in Oklahoma whose...

'Do You Struggle to Sleep at Night?' NBC's Brian Williams Asks Perry About Executions...And Rick Jacks It Out The Park LINK TO MUST SEE VIDEOBrian Williams: Governor Perry a question about Texas. Your state has executed 234 death row inmates more than any other governor in modern times. Have you struggled to sleep at night? Governor Rick Perry: No sir. I’ve never struggled with that at all… If you kill one of our children or police officers or another citizen in a crime you will face the ultimate justice in Texas

(CBS/WJTV/AP) JACKSON, Miss. - Deryl Dedmon, a white teen who is being charged in the hit-and-run death of a black man in Mississippi, could now face the death penalty in what authorities are calling a hate crime. Dedmon, 19, was initially charged with murder, but Hinds County District Attorney Robert Smith says he has new evidence that shows the victim, 49-year-old James Anderson, was robbed before he was killed, which makes it a capital case, reports CBS affiliate WJTV.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay accused the United States of breaking international law when Texas executed Mexican citizen Humberto Leal Garcia Jr. Thursday night. The execution sparked controversy after the International Court of Justice in the Hague determined in 2004 that the U.S. had violated the Vienna Convention when officials failed to tell foreign inmates about their right to visit their consular officials. But the U.S. Supreme Court voted yesterday that Texas could go ahead with the execution, even over the objection of President Barack Obama. Pillay said today the execution "raises particular legal concerns" about the...

<p>The Obama administration is taking the unusual step of asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stop Texas from executing a Mexican citizen who was convicted and sentenced to die for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl.</p> <p>The administration is asking the court to delay the July 7 execution of Humberto Leal, 38, for as long as six months to give Congress time to consider legislation that would directly affect Leal's case.</p>

An Aug. 16 execution for death row inmate Gary Haugen cannot proceed until a judge has adequately vetted whether the two-time killer is mentally competent, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled Wednesday. The court directed Marion County Circuit Judge Joseph Guimond to order a mental evaluation for Haugen and hold a hearing to determine his competence. The judge also must invalidate the death warrant he issued in May as well as rescind his decision allowing Haugen to dismiss his court-appointed attorneys. The judge must agree to take those actions or explain why his rulings should stand by July 7. If Guimond...

Ana Maria Cardona, the Miami woman convicted of torturing and beating her toddler son to death in 1990, will be executed for her crimes, a Miami-Dade judge ruled Friday.

It looks like the death penalty will remain an option in the Cheshire home invasion trial, as key lawmakers who supported abolition last year say they will cross over to the other side. Dr. William Hawke-Petit, the sole survivor of a highly publicized 2007 home invasion in which his wife and daughters were followed home, raped and murdered, has led a lobbying effort against abolishing the death penalty in Connecticut. State Sen. Edith Prague, who voted in favor of abolition last year, said she will switch sides this year. She made a strong statement to watchdog website CT News Junkie....

California will go yet another year without an execution on the largest death row in the nation. The ongoing legal challenge to the state's lethal injection procedures will not be completed this year, resulting in further delays in the ability of state officials to carry out executions at San Quentin state prison. Lawyers for the state and for death row inmates revealed during a conference with a federal judge last week that they will not be ready for a hearing in the case until at least December, according to a transcript of the proceeding released Monday. The primary holdup in...

Frontline’s next exposé focuses on the “decades of abuse of Native Americans by priests and other church workers in Alaska,” and in one particular town they find, “nearly 80% of the town’s children were molested” by Catholic priests. As we reported on this story just a few weeks ago, the Roman Catholic Church, as part of ongoing lawsuits, will make payments to approximately 700 male and female sexual and psychological abuse, molestation, and rape victims who were living in Alaska Native villages and Indian reservations from Montana to Washington, Idaho and Oregon, and who were “sexually or psychologically abused as...

A gruesome attack that killed a New Hampshire woman and wounded her daughter in a home invasion has led New Hampshire’s House to vote to expand the state’s death penalty law. The young men charged in the 2009 machete attack in Mont Vernon couldn’t have faced the death penalty because the crime doesn’t fall into one of six types of murders punishable by death under New Hampshire’s statute, one of the narrowest in the nation.

Like Charlie Sheen, California’s mouth keeps writing checks its body and talent can no longer cash. A state that once represented all the greatness of America–but a youthful and hip greatness, not a blue-collar, industrial greatness, like Detroit–a place where the knowing relatives of newly rich hillbillies advised them they ought to be, this state now instead loses its population. Or at least it would if not for the ongoing flood of illegal immigrants from drug-war-wracked Mexico. Mexico: also known as California South, California Mañana. To legal Americans, California has become more an absurdist hell to escape than the promised...

Per FR policy, I can only link to this New Yorker article. FULL STORYCheck out the third paragraph.

Most of the 35 states with capital punishment have run out of a key lethal injection drug or will soon, according to an Associated Press review. And in many places, switching to another drug could prove a difficult, drawn-out process, fraught with legal challenges from death row that could put executions on hold. The drug, an anesthetic called sodium thiopental, has become so scarce over the past year that a few states have had to postpone executions. Those delays could become widespread across the country in the coming months because of a decision last week by the sole U.S. manufacturer...

One of the great advantages from dropping out of, or even graduating from, the public school system is that you are almost guaranteed to have an IQ of 70 or below, and thereby earn a free pass to kidnap, murder, rape, pillage, or in this case, burn 9 people to death, and not have to face capital punishment yourself. This is the case of one Antun Lewis, 27, who has been given leniency from a possible death sentence - before his trial has even begun - by a Clinton appointed Ohio Federal District Judge Solomon Oliver, who seems not to...

The Indian government Wednesday said it would not abolish death penalty, but that capital punishment is awarded only to criminals involved in heinous crime considered as rarest of rare cases. "There is no proposal under consideration of the government to abolish capital punishment," Minister of State for Home Affairs Mullappally Ramachandran told the Indian Parliament in a written reply. Stating that since 2007, the UN General Assembly has adopted three resolutions titled "Moratorium on the use of the death penalty", the minister said that all these resolutions have been passed after a vote. But, he said that 141 countries had...

NASHVILLE - A prison warden will brush a hand over an inmate's eyelashes and gently shake the inmate to check for consciousness under a new lethal injection procedure that became necessary after a judge ruled the old one was unconstitutional, the attorney general said Wednesday. Chancellor Claudia Bonnyman ruled last week that Tennessee's process "allows for death by suffocation while conscious," in an appeal filed by inmate Stephen Michael West, who was convicted of two murders in 1986. Now it will be up to the warden to make sure the condemned inmate is unconscious, including calling out the person's name....

A death row inmate has asked a federal appeals court to halt his execution and has refused to choose a method of lethal injection. Lawyers for Albert Greenwood Brown filed court papers Sunday saying he is appealing a federal court judge's refusal to block his execution, which is scheduled for Wednesday. Brown also declined to choose between a one-drug lethal injection or execution by a three-drug cocktail. Brown's refusal to choose means a three-drug cocktail will be used if the appeals court doesn't block California's first execution in nearly five years. Brown also plans Monday to ask a Marin County...

Teresa Lewis, 41, was executed die by lethal injection. (AP) JARRATT, Va., Sept. 23 - Teresa Lewis, who plotted with a young lover to kill her husband and stepson for insurance money, became the first woman executed in Virginia in nearly 100 years Thursday night when she was killed by lethal injection. Authorities pronounced Lewis dead at 9:13 p.m. Lewis's case generated passion and interest across the world. The European Union asked Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) to commute her sentence to life, citing her mental capacity. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cited the case at an appearance in New...

A Virginia inmate who warned prosecutors he would kill again if not given the death penalty for strangling his cellmate was involved in the death of another inmate, authorities said. Wise County Commonwealth's Attorney Ron Elkins confirmed late Saturday that Robert Gleason Jr. was "involved" in the death of 26-year-old Aaron Alexander Cooper, though Elkins refused to elaborate. Gleason, who was already serving a life term for murder before killing his cellmate last year, has not been charged in the death. Cooper died Wednesday in the recreation yard for inmates housed in segregation at the maximum security Red Onion State...

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT - What Does the Bible Teach on this Vital Subject? Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man. (Genesis 9:6) 1. Instituted by God Himself Capital punishment was instituted by God Himself after the worldwide flood. We learn of this in Genesis 9:6--"Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man." This verse speaks of a murderer, one who knowingly and violently sheds another man's blood, resulting in death. God here gives man the authority...

America’s 250th DNA exoneration raises questions about how often we send the wrong person to prison.Freddie Peacock of Rochester, New York, was convicted of rape in 1976. This year he became the 250th person to be exonerated by DNA testing since the technique was first used in 1989. According to a new report by the Innocence Project, those 250 prisoners served a total of 3,160 years; 17 spent time on death row. Remarkably, 67 percent of them were convicted after 2000, a decade after the onset of modern DNA testing. The glaring question: How many more are there? Calculating the...

When Dr Harold Shipman, the worst serial killer in British history, committed suicide in 2004, the Home Secretary of the time David Blunkett confessed his first instinct on hearing the news was to 'open a bottle'. No doubt many felt the same way when they learnt that double child murderer Ian Huntley had been badly slashed across the throat in prison by a fellow inmate. Any sense of regret would be caused not by concern over Huntley's injuries, but the fact that his attacker failed to complete the job. Yet, in the wake of Shipman's death, Blunkett also expressed his...

GENEVA (AFP) – European countries on Wednesday stepped up pressure for a global halt to the death penalty, as opponents of capital punishment hailed the growing number of countries scrapping or suspending executions. The United Nations and participants in the World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Geneva said about 140 countries had now abolished death sentences or stopped carrying them out. "More than two-thirds of the United Nations member states abolished the death penalty, by law or in practice," Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero of Spain, which holds the presidency of the European Union, told the congress. Two decades...

Long ago, executions of convicts were carried out in public view. Then they were carried out of public sight, in chambers and prisons, with a red lamp glowing to indicate that an execution is taking place. I have started this thread because I want to ask this question: Should prisoner executions be televised live?Yes or No?

Anti-death penalty movement wooing conservatives LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Roy Brown seems like a rarity — a conservative who's against the death penalty. But to Brown, a state senator and the 2008 Republican nominee for governor of Montana, the philosophy aligns perfectly with conservative ideology. He's one of the more high-profile figures reaching out to other social and fiscal conservatives, hoping to create a bipartisan movement against capital punishment. "I believe that life is precious from the womb to a natural death," Brown said. The Roman Catholic church has long been an organized and vocal critic of the death penalty, but...

It is Thursday, December 03, 2009, and as I write these words, Bobby Wayne Woods is alive. If you are reading this on December 4, 2009 or later, there is a strong likelihood that he will no longer be so, having been executed by the State of Texas for a grisly murder he committed in 1997.

<p>WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has thrown out, for the third time, a federal appeals court ruling favorable to a convicted murderer in California whose case has bounced around the courts for a quarter-century.</p> <p>The justices, in an unsigned opinion today, moved to reinstate the death penalty for Fernando Belmontes in the beating death of a 19-year-old woman in 1981.</p>

In Texas, they're conducting the first state-sponsored review of a capital punishment case. Specifically, they're looking into the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was convicted and executed for setting a house fire that killed his three children. An expert on fire science says there was "no basis" to rule the fire an arson, the Chicago Tribune reports. The state fire marshal on the case, Beyler concluded in his report, had "limited understanding" of fire science. The fire marshal "seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires and how fire injuries are created," he wrote. The marshal's findings,...

Sonia Sotomayor says the death penalty disproportionately impacts minorities. A question for her: Death sentences are meted out most often to (a) blacks, (b) whites, (c) Hispanics or (d) the guilty. A recently unearthed memo not disclosed on the questionnaire filed with the Senate Judiciary Committee shows that the empathy that the Supreme Court nominee feels is more for the predators among us than their victims. It also shows that some of the reasons this self-proclaimed "wise Latina" has for opposing capital punishment are bogus and flawed.

ALBUQUERQUE - A notorious convicted murderer and rapist is out of lockup Sunday ... Mister Saunders was 13-years-old when he tortured, murdered and then raped his neighbor in 2002. Due to his age, he could not be tried as an adult. Saunders was locked up until he turned 21—which is the maximum sentence under the juvenile code.

Harvard Islamic chaplain Taha Abdul-Basser ’96 has recently come under fire for controversial statements in which he allegedly endorsed death as a punishment for Islamic apostates. In a private e-mail to a student last week, Abdul-Basser wrote that there was “great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment [for apostates]) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand.” The e-mail was forwarded over Muslim student e-mail lists and later picked up by the blogosphere, sparking debate and, in...

WALLA WALLA, Wash. (AP) -- Four people designated to administer lethal injections to death-row inmates at the Washington State Penitentiary have resigned, apparently worried that their identities could become public in court. The Seattle Times reported Thursday that the four resigned Tuesday for fear that their names would become known as a result of litigation on whether lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment..... Full article: HERE

Gov. Bill Richardson signed legislation Wednesday repealing New Mexico's death penalty, making it the second state to ban executions since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Richardson, a Democrat who formerly supported capital punishment, said signing the bill was the "most difficult decision" of his political life but that "the potential for ... execution of an innocent person stands as anathema to our very sensibilities as human beings." Richardson said he made the decision after going to the state penitentiary, where he saw the death chamber and visited the maximum security unit where those sentenced to...

The New Mexico Senate voted to abolish capital punishment, a measure already approved by the lower House that Governor Bill Richardson must sign before it goes into effect, the Senate said on its website. The Democratic-controlled Senate voted 24-18 to strike the death penalty from its law books. Democrat Richardson, who last month withdrew as President Barack Obama's pick to be commerce secretary, has not made clear whether he agrees with the repeal measure or plans to veto it, but lawmakers said they expect him to sign it into law. Supporters of the measure argue that replacing the death sentence...