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After claiming his innocence for over two decades, William Happ finally confessed to murder as he was put to death by lethal injection in the US state of Florida. News reports said Happ took over 15 minutes to die, as his body repeatedly made convulsive movements, as the state corrections system used a new lethal chemical for the first time. Happ, 51, had spent 24 years on death row for the murder of a young woman named Angela Crowley in 1986. Happ, who had drug and alcohol problems, met Crowley in a parking lot. The woman was strangled and raped,...

Officials said William Happ was pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m. at Florida State Prison in Starke. He was executed by injection. Florida has executed 51-year-old William Happ for the 1986 rape and strangulation of a woman he encountered by chance in a convenience store parking lot. Officials said Happ was pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m. at Florida State Prison in Starke. He was executed by injection, 24 years after he was sentenced to die following his conviction in the murder of 21-year-old Angie Crowley. In a final statement, Happ expressed remorse for his actions. "To my agonizing shame, I must...

The compound Propofol has long been the most popular anesthetic drug in the United States, with some 50 million doses administered in the country’s hospitals and other medical facilities every year. But plans by several US states to begin using the drug for executions have drawn wide concern in the European Union, where near 90 percent of the Propofol supplied to America is manufactured. Now, out of concern that EU regulations will result in severe restrictions on the drug’s export, the German pharmaceutical firm that is the top manufacturer of Propofol, as well as advocacy groups in the US, are...

Two men were executed in the United States with a drug not yet approved by federal authorities. In Texas, which has put to death more people than any other US state, prison authorities said Michael Yowell was pronounced dead at 7:11 pm. Yowell was sentenced to death for killing his parents when he was 28 years old after stealing money from them to buy drugs. He had also opened a gas valve so that the house would explode. In Arizona, 71-year-old Edward Schad died at 10:12 am. Schad was sentenced to death for the 1978 murder of a 74-year-old whose...

Maryland's law repealing the death penalty went into effect Tuesday. Maryland is now the 18th state to end capital punishment. Those found guilty of first-degree murder will now face a life sentence or life without the possibility of parole.

Man convicted of killing two women, attempting to kill a third, executed by lethal injectionA convicted killer who had been on death row for 23 years was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on Tuesday. Marshall Lee Gore, 49, was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m., authorities said. Gore, a former Miami-Dade escort service owner, was convicted of killing two women in the 1980s and executed for the March 1988 murder of of one of those women, exotic dancer Robyn Novick. The 30-year-old nude body was found dumped in rural Miami-Dade County. Gore was also convicted of killing another...

A special unit of the religious police pursues magical crime aggressively, and the convicted face death sentences.The sorceress was naked. The sight of her bare flesh startled the prudish officers of Saudi Arabia's infamous religious police, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV), which had barged into her room in what was supposed to be a routine raid of a magical hideout in the western desert city of Madinah's Al-Seeh neighborhood. They paused in shock, and to let her dress. The woman -- still unclothed -- managed to slip out of the window of...

This week has pissed me off. It’s been a week filled with news I’d rather forget, but really, it’s one we all should remember. It should be a rallying cry, an opportunity for those interested in justice to reform a broken system and expedite a punishment reserved for a deserving few. A college baseball player from Australia was murdered in Duncan, Okla., because three monsters were bored. The sheer convergence of bad parenting required to bring these three together and have none of them, not one, object to the idea of murdering a random stranger for lack of anything to...

Maj. Nidal Hasan and many of his victims in the Fort Hood shooting seem to want the same thing—his death. But while survivors and relatives of the dead view lethal injection as justice, the Army psychiatrist appears to see it as something else—martyrdom. …

Mona Nelson Trial – She Kidnapped Him, She Tied Him Up With Twine, and Then Slowly Burned Him To Death With A Blowtorch -On Christmas Eve- The Trial Began This Week Houston Texas - Christmas Eve 2010 a 12-year-old boy named Jonathan Foster should have been preparing for presents and family. Instead, he was tied up with string, and slowly being burned alive by a blowtorch in the hands of Mona Nelson who had kidnapped him from his home hours earlier. Her trial began this week. Texas Chron - Prosecutors promised Wednesday they could show how, but not why, accused...

The nation’s most active death penalty state is running out of its execution drug. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice said Thursday that its remaining supply of pentobarbital expires in September and that no alternatives have been found. It wasn’t immediately clear whether two executions scheduled for next month would be delayed. The state has already executed 11 death-row inmates this year, and at least seven more have execution dates in coming months. … Texas switched to the lethal, single-dose sedative last year after one of the drugs used in its three-drug execution process became difficult to obtain and the...

An Ohio inmate whose 450-pound weight became an issue in his death penalty case has died seven months after being granted clemency, officials said Friday. Ronald Post died Thursday morning at a prison hospital where he’d been treated on and off since 2011, a state prisons spokeswoman said. He was a week shy of his 54th birthday. Post was sentenced to death for killing Elyria motel clerk Helen Vantz on Dec. 15, 1983. His attorneys sought mercy for Post ahead of his Jan. 16 execution date on the grounds that he was so obese that he could not be executed...

Guilt or innocence was never really the big question at hand in the bizarre and sickening case of Ariel Castro, the Ohio-area man who kidnapped three women, imprisoned them in his home, repeatedly raped them, and starved and beat one victim into having multiple miscarriages. Shortly after the three women were finally returned to freedom back in May, however, the big question that arose was whether Castro could face the death penalty for deliberately killing the victim’s children in the womb. In Ohio, causing “the unlawful termination of another’s pregnancy� against her will constitutes aggravated murder, and the death penalty...

A condemned Cleveland killer moved one step closer to execution Tuesday despite a rare plea for mercy from the prosecutor overseeing his case and support from nearly half of a board that previously voted unanimously against him. The Ohio Parole Board voted 6-4 to turn down a request for clemency for death row inmate Billy Slagle, sentenced to die for stabbing a neighbor 17 times almost three decades ago. The entire board ruled against clemency two years ago for Slagle, but that was before the election of new Cuyahoga County prosecutor Tim McGinty and a change in his office’s approach...

A judge has temporarily stayed a Georgia inmate’s scheduled execution Monday, after attorneys raised questions involving the state’s supply of execution drugs. … It wasn’t the first time (Warren Lee) Hill’s scheduled execution has been halted by a challenge to Georgia’s execution method. Last July, a previous execution date was put on hold by an earlier challenge to the state’s plan to change from a three-drug injection to a single dose of pentobarbital. …

Military prosecutors want two potential jurors tossed from the murder trial of the Fort Hood shooting rampage suspect because the Army officers indicated they opposed the death penalty.Four colonels and two lieutenant colonels were brought in from Army posts nationwide and overseas on Monday as questioning continued in the court-martial of Maj. Nidal Hasan. …

ST. LOUIS — With drugs needed for lethal injection in short supply and courts wrangling over how to execute prisoners without them, Missouri's attorney general is floating one possible solution: Bring back the gas chamber. In court filings and interviews this week, Attorney General Chris Koster noted that Missouri statutes allow two options for executions: lethal injection and death by gas. Koster's comments come amid his growing frustration over the Missouri Supreme Court's refusal to set execution dates until lethal injection issues are resolved. "The Missouri death penalty statute has been, in my opinion, unnecessarily entangled in the courts for...

Pollution is killing the world; a strong statement, but true. Certain levels of pollution are considered acceptable by many, such as vehicle exhaust fumes, but large levels of pollution must be controlled. Unfortunately the general attitude towards pollution in many countries, especially the US, is pretty lax. People do go to jail for crimes against the environment, but it is very rare, with soft fines usually the main form of punishment. In Europe environmental regulations are far tougher, and jail terms and hefty fines are far more common. Yet still pollution continues. Maybe in order to fully dissuade companies from...

Woman sentenced to death walks free, is to go shopping with victim's grandson By AnneClaire Stapleton, CNN (CNN) -- Paula Cooper was just 16 years old when she became the youngest person on death row in the United States. That was in 1986. On Monday, after 27 years behind bars, Cooper walked out of Indiana's Rockville Correctional Facility a free woman. She emerged around 10 a.m., said Douglas S. Garrison, chief communications officer for the Indiana Department of Corrections. Cooper had an unlikely ally supporting her release: Bill Pelke, the grandson of the woman she killed...

US SOLDIER Robert Bales, who killed 16 Afghan civilians during a rampage in Kandahar last year, will escape the death penalty by pleading guilty to murder. ... Sixteen people, mainly women and children, were killed in two villages near the base during the rampage. Some of the bodies were piled up and set on fire. ... Last month, AP spoke to locals in the villages that Bales terrorised. "Relatives of the victims became outraged at the notion Bales might escape the death penalty," it said. One man, Mohammed Wazir, who lost 11 family members including his mother and two-year-old daughter...

When faced with a question of clemency or justice, Hickenlooper gave himself a pardon from responsibility. Colorado governor John Hickenlooper grants Nathan Dunlap a temporary reprieve In Colorado, the fate of convicted murderer Nathan Dunlap has been an issue of great debate. This past week, the governor of Colorado, John Hickenlooper, made what has to be one of the most cowardly decisions ever seen in politics by putting a man’s life and the expectations of his victims on hold just long enough to take the decision out of his hands. In 1993, Nathan Dunalap waltzed into a Chuck E. Cheese...

<p>AUSTRALIA'S closest neighbour Papua New Guinea has moved tonight to introduce the death penalty - and suffocation is one of the approved execution methods.</p> <p>The nation's parliament has passed amendments to its criminal code that will allow death sentences for rape, murder and robbery.</p>

In an interview Friday, jury foreman William Zervakos provided a glimpse into the private deliberations, describing four women and eight men who struggled with the question: How heinous of a killing deserves a similar fate? "The system we think is flawed in that sense because this was not a case of a Jeffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson," Zervakos told The Associated Press. "It was a brutal no-win situation. ... I think that's kind of unfair," the 69-year-old added. "We're not lawyers. We can't interpret the law. We're mere mortals. And I will tell you I've never felt more mere as...

For FReepers that care about murder victims and their families and the injustice(s) that go on within our legal system and now with our piece of crap governor getting involved in the last hour. This is hard to listen to in many parts, but this man's story deserves to be heard. His daughter and the other victims deserve to be remembered. On Thursday May 23rd, 2013, Denver radio show host Michael Brown (Heckuva Job Brownie of Katrina) talked with Dennis O'Connor. In 1993, his daughter, Colleen Rose O'Connor, was murdered along with three other employees of Chuck E. Cheese in...

What do you think of Gov. John Hickenlooper's decision to grant a temporary reprieve to death-row inmate Nathan Dunlap? Total Votes = 1137 He made the right decision 152 Votes, or 13.36 % He should have granted clemency 101 Votes, or 8.883 % He should have let the execution proceed 884 Votes, or 77.74 %

LUCASVILLE, Ohio — One family wept loudly and another family cheered Wednesday as a man was executed for killing a 6-month-old as he raped her. Steve Smith, 46, was executed by lethal injection at the state prison in Lucasville in southern Ohio for the 1998 killing of his live-in girlfriend's daughter, Autumn Carter, in Mansfield. Smith had recently tried to get his sentence reduced to life in prison, arguing that he was too drunk to realize that his assault was killing Autumn and that he didn't mean to hurt her. The Ohio Parole Board and Gov. John Kasich turned him...

Jodi Arias says she would rather receive the death penalty than a long prison sentence after she was convicted of first-degree murder Wednesday, calling death "the ultimate freedom." In an exclusive interview with MyFoxPhoenix.com, Arias says she was shocked by the verdict. "I think I just went blank," Arias said. "I just feel overwhelmed. I think I just need to take it a day at a time. It was unexpected for me. There was no premeditation on my part." Arias spent 18 days on the stand sharing intimate, emotional and oftentimes X-rated details of her life before a rapt television...

Islamberg, located in rural upstate New York, is a 70 acre underground-bunkered paramilitary Islamic compound. Here within the compound lives a Muslim only community. The majority of these are black american born males, hardened criminals who converted to radical Islam whilst serving time in state prison. It is also the headquarters of Muslims of the Americas, the International Quranic Open University and the United Muslim Christian Forum. Islamberg is the best known among 35 such compounds, ranging in size from 25 to 300 acres, that already dot 22 states across America. Evidence suggests these Islamic compounds and the convicted criminals...

Don is angry with me. He cannot understand why I support punishing rapists with death while simultaneously defending the rights of the unborn. He accuses me of applying double standards, promoting hypocrisy, and of being "inconsistent." But I am perfectly consistent in my beliefs. And, truth be known, so is Don. The reason so many people are unfairly labeled as "inconsistent" is because the term "double standard" is applied in such a haphazard fashion. People are actually guilty of applying a double standard when they treat two identical things differently. On the other hand, they are not applying a...

Yesterday, the primary defense theory in the Kermit Gosnell murder case was explored by defense attorney Jack McMahon, who posits that all the babies aborted at Gosnell’s clinic were already dead when their spinal cords were “snipped” to ensure “fetal demise.” WARNING: This story contains graphic images and descriptions.… McMahon pressed former Gosnell employee Lynda Williams concerning her duties at Gosnell’s ‘House of Horrors” abortion clinic that included cleaning up and disposing of babies born after late-term abortions, many of which were beyond the legal gestational limit of 24 weeks. Williams had previously testified of a baby that was delivered...

STARKE — Larry Eugene Mann, who crushed a little girl's skull 32 years ago, died Wednesday night as chemicals coursed through his veins. Mann was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison for the murder of 10-year-old Elisa Vera Nelson, whom he abducted one morning in 1980 as she rode her bicycle to school in Palm Harbor. He was pronounced dead at 7:19 p.m. He was 59. Afterward, Jeff Nelson, Elisa's brother, stood in the light of a setting sun outside the prison, joining a crowd of about 50 people who turned out to offer support. Nelson, who was...

Monsters among us: yet another illegal alien pedophile strikes- by John HillStand With Arizona Illegal aliens are leaving a trail of victims from coast to coast - a massive crime wave that most Americans don't know about - because the media typically plays it down. And so frequently the victims are children or involve children - thanks to a perverse Mexican culture that virtually ensures the victimization of the young. There was one such a murder last night outside Phoenix. Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his Maricopa County Sheriff's detectives are  are investigating thmurder that happened late Monday night in...

Autumn Carter, a Mansfield, Ohio girl, was raped and killed in 1998. She was six-months old (that’s right). Her convicted killer, Steven Smith, has a May 1 date with the executioner. Yesterday, he appeared before the Ohio Parole Board, where he pleaded for mercy. Smith, 31 years old at the time he took baby Autumn’s life, has not repented his evil. He says his life should be spared because he really didn’t mean to kill the infant. He just wanted to have sex with her. The convicted killer’s public defenders, Joseph Wilhelm and Tyson Fleming, had his back yesterday at...

After a week of legal twists and turns, James Holmes learned Monday that he will face execution if convicted in the Colorado theater attack that killed 12 people. George Brauchler, a prosecutor in the case, told the court that his office decided on seeking the death penalty after consulting 800 victims and family members. He said he spoke to 60 victims himself.

DOVER, Del. — The state Senate on Tuesday narrowly approved a bill repealing Delaware's death penalty after removing a provision that would have spared the lives of 17 inmates currently awaiting execution. The measure passed by a vote of 11-10, with five Democrats and five Republicans voting against it. Three Republicans sided with majority Democrats in voting for the bill after a lengthy and sometimes emotional debate. The measure, opposed by Attorney General Beau Biden and several leaders of the law enforcement community, now goes to the state House for consideration. Democratic Gov. Jack Markell has refused to say whether...

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — A man previously charged with having child pornography cut an electronic monitoring device off his ankle before carjacking a woman, fatally stabbing her and raping her 10-year-old daughter, authorities said. David J. Renz abducted the school librarian and her daughter as they left a gymnastics class at a mall in the Syracuse suburb of Clay, about 150 miles west of Albany, on Thursday night, state police said Friday. Renz bound both victims, raped the girl and drove a short distance to a spot where the girl escaped and was found by a passing motorist, troopers said....

(Lake County, Ind., Sheriff's Department- Christopher M. Bour of Gary, Ind., is one of two people indicted this week on federal charges involving the alleged sale of a young child for use in producing child pornography.) An Indiana woman is charged in a federal indictment with selling her 1½-year-old daughter to a man she met through a dating service for child pornography, according to court documents. Natisha Hillard, 24, and Christopher M. Bour, 39, both of Gary, are charged in the five-count grand jury indictment unsealed this week and filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Hammond. Hillard is...

Maryland’s Senate voted on Wednesday to repeal the state’s death penalty, putting it on a path to becoming the 18th state to abolish executions. … Maryland’s last execution was in 2005. …

December 30, 2012. The headline on Drudge, beneath a picture of redcoats blazing away in a Lexington and Concord re-enactment, reads: "OBAMA TO GO FOR GUNS IN 2013 / 'THERE WILL BE RESISTANCE'." Resistance indeed there will be, and rightly so. Fortunately, conservatives' stand against infringements on gun rights is bolstered by the Supreme Court's recent admission that, as originally understood, the Second Amendment does indeed recognize an individual right to keep and bear arms. But another assault is under way on another part of the Constitution -- an assault that has claimed far more innocent lives over the years...

New Delhi: Coming under increasing criticism from India for not awarding the death penalty for 26/11 Mumbai Attacks plotter David Headley, US Authorities defended on Friday that Headley hadn’t been awarded death penalty as he had ‘cooperated with the security agencies during the investigation process’. “This decision was taken because of Headley's willingness to cooperate with law enforcement authorities -- American, Indian and others -- to help bring the perpetrators to justice and prevent other terrorist attacks," read a US embassy statement. The statement is being viewed as veiled snubbing to India's requests to award death penalty to Headley, or...

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - The execution of Kimberly McCarthy was postponed by a Texas judge on Tuesday, the day she was to die, to give her lawyers time to argue that racial discrimination played a role in choosing the jury that convicted her. It was rescheduled for April 3 and, if carried out, McCarthy will be the first woman to be put to death in the United States in nearly three years.

A Texas woman convicted of the gruesome slaying and robbery of her neighbor, a retired 71-year-old college psychology professor, is set to be the first woman put to death in the United States since 2010. A Dallas County jury already found former nursing home therapist Kimberly McCarthy guilty of the 1997 killing when evidence at the punishment phase of her trial tied her to two similar murders a decade earlier.“Once the jury heard about those other two, we were certainly in a deep hole,” recalled McCarthy’s lead trial attorney, Doug Parks. Jurors decided McCarthy should die. Her execution, set for...

WASHINGTON: Despite India's efforts to extradite Pakistani American David Headley over the Mumbai terror attack, the US has virtually ruled out the possibility saying that the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operative "will serve in the United States". Asked to comment on a report that India wanted to keep up the effort to extradite Headley, state department spokesperson Victoria Nuland Friday noted: "He's been tried, convicted, and will serve in the United States." Even as India expressed disappointment at the 35 year sentence given by a Chicago court to David Headley, the US called it a very positive example of US-Indian collaboration in...

DES MOINES — A state senator will push for public hearings on the death penalty in the Iowa Senate and House of Representatives as he files legislation to bring capital punishment back to Iowa. Sen. Kent Sorenson, R-Milo, has championed the idea of reintroducing the death penalty in Iowa since the abduction and killing of Elizabeth Collins, 8, and Lyric Cook, 10, this summer in Evansdale. Elizabeth’s parents joined Sorenson and parents of other missing and murdered children at a Capitol news conference, where the senator outlined five pieces of legislation he plans to introduce this session. Iowa abolished the...

The new judge in the Fort Hood shooting rampage case faces a controversial decision next week: whether to spare Nidal Hasan a possible death sentence and let him plead guilty in the worst mass shooting on a U.S. military installation. Hasan wants to plead guilty to 13 counts of premeditated murder, Army rules prohibit a judge from accepting a guilty plea in a death penalty case...

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources says it's notifying about 5,000 people after an employee accessed their driving and motor vehicle records without authorization. The agency said in a statement Tuesday that the employee is no longer employed by the DNR. Spokesman Chris Niskanen says he can't elaborate on that. The DNR says it has asked the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to investigate. No charges have been filed so far. The DNR says its own investigation found no indication the data was sold, disclosed to others or used for criminal purposes. But the agency is advising the 5,000 affected people...

<p>GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) - The government won't seek the death penalty for a group of men charged in the 2010 death of a Lansing woman.</p> <p>The Grand Rapids Press reported Friday (http://bit.ly/WxWIie ) that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder notified West Michigan federal prosecutors of the government's decision.</p>

Think back to the last time you listened to the nightly news and heard a story about an eight year old girl that was missing for two weeks, and then found in a shallow grave with evidence of having been raped. The grave turned out to be in the back yard of a “person of interest” identified within a day of the child’s disappearance. Why? Because he was a registered pedophile. When you heard that story, did you wish our society had tried harder to help the child rapist-turned-murderer? Or did you wish we were a stronger, less tolerant society?

NEW DELHI: Jolted by the extreme cruelty unleashed on Nirbhaya by the only juvenile among the six accused in the Delhi gang-rape case, the government may be looking at enhanced punishment for minors — even a waiver of the delinquent's age by six months to a year — keeping in view the severity of the crime. While this review comes too late for the Delhi gang-rape case as it cannot be applied with retrospective effect, the shift is significant because heinousness of the crime committed rather than the exact age of the accused will determine the punishment. If the government...

The Obama administration and the Secretary of State all blame the "fog of war" for their disastrous Ben Ghazi blunder. When Hillary Clinton gets sick, she goes AWOL. When its very obvious that American soldiers "go crazy," they are condemned to death. That's what the U.S. Army is seeking in the case of Staff Sgt Robert Bales. (CNN) -- A U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers in a shooting rampage could face the death penalty if he is found guilty in a court-martial. Our DOD  (Department Of Defense) always wanting to prove how holier than thou they are by...