Free Republic

South Carolina’s highest court will hear arguments Thursday on whether a newly organized firing squad or the old electric chair are legal ways to execute inmates in the state, which has been unable to obtain drugs for lethal injections. A lower court judge ruled in September that South Carolina lawmakers “ignored advances in scientific research and evolving standards of humanity and decency” when they passed a law effectively forcing condemned prisoners to choose between electrocution or the firing squad. The state appealed and the South Carolina Supreme Court will hear arguments Thursday over whether the 2,000-volt electric chair or the...

The first openly transgender woman slated for execution in the US is appealing to Missouri’s governor for mercy, citing mental health struggles. Lawyers for Amber McLaughlin, 49, on Monday asked Republican Gov. Mike Parson to spare her life before her Jan. 3 execution. She was convicted of killing her 45-year-old ex-girlfriend Beverly Guenther on Nov. 20, 2003. Guenther was raped and stabbed to death in St. Louis County.

The Missouri Department of Corrections successfully carried out its execution of Kevin Johnson early Tuesday evening. The execution was carried out at 7:40 p.m. at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri. Johnson, 37, died via lethal injection. Prior to his execution, he made no final statement. Missouri Governor Mike Parson issued the following statement after Johnson’s death: Today, the State of Missouri carried out Kevin Johnson’s sentence as ordered by the Missouri Supreme Court. Mr. Johnson was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2005 murder of Sgt. Bill McEntee. Mr. Johnson’s claims were reviewed...

Payton Gendron pleaded guilty Monday to state charges stemming from the May shooting at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo. Gendron pleaded guilty to 15 charges in all, including domestic terrorism motivated by hate, murder and attempted murder. He still faces more than two dozen federal charges, some of which carry the possibility of the death penalty. His sentencing is scheduled for Feb. 15, 2023. Domestic terrorism motivated by hate carries a mandatory life sentence. He was charged with carrying out a "domestic act of terrorism motivated by hate" along with 10 counts of murder in the first degree, 10 counts...

It took four years and nine months before Nicolas Cruz was finally sentenced for the murder of seventeen people in the horrific Parkland massacre. So much of the legal system focuses on fairness to the criminal; but the damage to the victims and their families as they wait for trial is tremendous. Those who have to testify or give victim impact statements must continually think about what they will say at trial. There is also uncertainty about the verdict and whether the murderer will be punished. In the Parkland case, the victims were denied the closure of Cruz receiving the...

The coalition negotiations: Ben Gvir will ask to include in the agreements a death penalty law for terrorists Moran Azoulai, November 14, 2022 The chairman of Otzma Yehudit Itamar Ben Gvir is expected today (Monday) to request the death penalty law for terrorists as a clause in the coalition agreements. The law has been on and off the agenda from time to time due to elements that took part in the coalition and opposed it. Now, in the emerging right-wing government, there seems to be a clear majority for the law. However, it is not clear how motivated the Likud...

A convicted killer in Oklahoma was executed Thursday despite his lawyers arguing he was mentally ill and unaware of his imminent death. Benjamin Cole, 57, was pronounced dead at 10:22 a.m. local time at Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, attorney Tom Hird told The Post. Cole was sentenced to death in 2004 for the Dec. 20, 2002, murder of his 9-month-old daughter. CNN reported after the baby’s cries interrupted Cole’s video game, he broke her spine.

Inmate Benjamin Cole was executed by the state of Oklahoma Thursday morning for the 2002 killing of his 9-month-old daughter. He was pronounced dead at 10.22am Central Time. The 57-year-old died by lethal injection. His attorneys had previously argued that Cole was mentally ill and not competent to be executed. Cole was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and, according to his attorneys, is 'incapacitated by his mental illness to the point of being essentially non-functional.' Attorneys for the state and members of the victim's family, however, have said that symptoms of Cole's mental illness are exaggerated and that the brutality of...

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The Ohio Supreme Court upheld the death sentence Wednesday for an inmate who argued her attorneys didn’t properly raise in her defense trauma she experienced, including gender dysphoria. The court ruled 6-1 to uphold Victoria Drain’s conviction and death sentence in the 2019 beating death of Christopher Richardson, a fellow inmate in the residential treatment unit at Warren Correctional Institution in southwestern Ohio. Drain killed Richardson by beating, stabbing and strangling him, according to court records. Drain had been placed on the unit, which provides inmate psychiatric services, “due to her attempt to self-castrate because she...

The three jurors who voted against the death penalty for Parkland killer Nikolas Cruz did so based on “mitigating circumstances” from Cruz’s life. They made the wrong call, but their rationale is superior to the reason many will agree with the sentence: a blanket opposition to the death penalty. Public support for capital punishment has slid over the last 30 years, remaining a majority opinion but barely so. Those who oppose death as a punishment often have kind, even noble intentions. Yet their well-meaning beliefs do not translate into justice or the common good. The death penalty is consistent with...

LIVE Jury reaches decision in Nikolas Cruz sentencing trial: Live updates. 15 mins ago (Looks like NO death penalty. )

"[W]e have seen leveraging athletics and extracurriculars as a way to boost you vaccination as an effective tactic across the county.” The federal government's response to the Covid-19 pandemic may already be one of the most infamous chapters in U.S. history. But new evidence keeps coming to light that reveals the "Experts" were every bit as cynical and dishonest as most citizens had figured out years ago. An August 2021 email by the U.S. Department of Education's Anne Hartge, of the Office of Communications and Outreach, following up on a conversation between Eric Hagarty, who is now Pennsylvania’s current Secretary...

Alabama told a federal judge that it could soon be ready to use a new, untried execution method called nitrogen hypoxia to carry out a death sentence. The disclosure came Monday at a court hearing over inmate Alan Miller’s request to block his scheduled Sept. 22 execution by lethal injection. Miller maintains that prison staff lost paperwork he returned in 2018 requesting nitrogen hypoxia, an execution method that the state has authorized but never used. […] Nitrogen hypoxia is a proposed execution method in which death would be caused by forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen, thereby depriving him...

Cleotha Abston-Henderson, 38, has been charged with first-degree murder in relation to mother-of-two Eliza Fletcher He is accused of kidnapping her as she was out jogging at 4.30am on Friday and 'violently' bundled her into his SUV Authorities announced on Tuesday that Fletcher's body had been found by an abandoned house after an exhaustive search Abston-Henderson was previously jailed for 22 years after kidnapping a lawyer in Memphis in 2000, driving him around at gunpoint Records show that he was previously arrested for raping a man and several assaults before he turned 16, and was first in juvenille court aged...

COLUMBIA, S.C. (WSPA) – A South Carolina court has ruled that the electric chair and firing squad are unconstitutional and the state cannot execute inmates by those methods. In Tuesday’s ruling, Circuit Court Judge Jocelyn Newman ruled that both methods of execution are cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the South Carolina Constitution. “In 2021, South Carolina turned back the clock and became the only state in the country in which a person may be forced into the electric chair if he refuses to elect how he will die,” Newman wrote in her ruling. “In doing so, the General...

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — A coalition of advocacy groups is opposing Alabama’s plan to sell $725 million in bonds to finance construction of two new supersize prisons. The Communities Not Prisons coalition, a group formed to oppose the construction, and other organizations issued statements Monday opposing the looming bond sale. The bonds would have a 2052 maturity date. “It means that this is a project to marry our state to mass incarceration for the better part of this century. It means that Alabamians, and Black Alabamians in particular, will continue to be incarcerated and brutalized by the Alabama Department of...

Capital punishment is back in the news. There were actually those who protested the execution of mass-murdering Islamic terrorist John Muhammad, just as there will, no doubt, be those who protest the execution of mass-murdering Islamic terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan. More alarming to me is what appears to be an increase in people saying that capital punishment doesn't square with their "Christian faith." Let's get something straight: There are few things the Bible is more clear about than the fact that God commands us to put murderers to death. Not only does he command it, but he says that failure...

By On his final day in office, Jan. 20, 2001, President Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of a pair of radical leftists serving time for bombing the U.S. Capitol building, where a 1983 blast shattered the second floor of the Senate wing. Linda Evans and Susan Rosenberg each served 16 years of lengthy sentences, with Rosenberg escaping 42 years of a 58-year sentence and Evans cutting short a 40-year sentence by 24 years. The FBI landed formal indictments on Evans and Rosenberg in the 1988 “Resistance Conspiracy” case for their involvement in the bombing of the Capitol along with five...

Julius and ethel Rosenberg were executed 55 years ago, on June 19, 1953. But last week, they were back in the headlines when Morton Sobell, the co-defendant in their famous espionage trial, finally admitted that he and his friend, Julius, had both been Soviet agents. It was a stunning admission; Sobell, now 91 years old, had adamantly maintained his innocence for more than half a century. After his comments were published, even the Rosenbergs' children, Robert and Michael Meeropol, were left with little hope to hang on to -- and this week, in comments unlike any they've made previously, the...

The New York Times reports that the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg now accept that their father was a spy for the Soviet Union based on the belated admission of a confederate, Morton Sobel, age 91, that he had lied for more than a half-century when he said they were innocent of a conspiracy to give government military secrets to the USSR. The sons' desire to vindicate their parents spurred their political radicalism in the 1960s and 70s and led them to establish the Rosenberg Fund for Children, a charity for the children of leftist activists, which CRC described...